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5 Basic Principles of Effective Web Design

These days, only the most remote and old-fashioned businesses remain ignorant of the necessity of having a website; but unfortunately that doesn’t mean that we all know what we’re doing. Clunky websites that are slow to load or impossible to read on mobile phones are surprisingly common.

But you don’t need to spend big budgets on big agencies to get an effective website for your business. Whether you go it alone on a platform like WordPress or you brief a designer to create a bespoke site, there are some basic principles of effective web design to bear in mind…

1. Start with your business objective

What is the purpose of your website? What action do you want your visitors to take? Do you want them to read your blog posts? Sign up for your newsletter? Buy your product? Clarity on your number one objective will help you to focus on the most crucial information ‘above the fold’ (i.e. within the first part of the website that is visible without scrolling), with a clear call to action (a green button has been shown to work well!). This focus will also mean that you can get rid of all that clutter that doesn’t really contribute to your objective; white space can be very effective.

2. Make the navigation simple and intuitive

You may think you’re being creative with some never-before-seen design but all you’re doing is creating barriers between you and your potential customer, and the likely outcome is that they will simply give up and leave. People tend to read from left to right, they’re used to horizontal menus at the top or vertical menus down the left, and they’re impatient and will drop off if they have to go through too many steps or clicks. Bear this in mind and follow the basic conventions so that people feel immediately comfortable and can get straight to work with finding the information they’re looking for.

3. Make sure it’s mobile friendly

A lot of small business websites still don’t take into account the large and ever-increasing number of visitors that are using a tablet or a mobile. Depending on the nature of your business, the proportion of mobile users can be larger than desktop – so what’s the point in having some fancy design that simply doesn’t work for half your customers? Making your website mobile responsive (so that it adapts to the screen size of the device) doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg – many WordPress themes are mobile responsive as default, while if you’re working with an agency or designer you should specify this as a mandatory criterion of the site.

4. Keep the writing short and crisp

Don’t try to sound clever or get too creative with your writing, whether we’re talking about menu labels, call-to-action buttons, or the main body text on the site. Instead, make sure you’re using consumer language and avoiding jargon, highlight important words and phrases using bold and italics, break up long text with bullets and short paragraphs. Again, people are impatient and will be scanning the site for the information they’re after – confuse them or take too long to get to the point and they’ll get frustrated and go elsewhere.

5. Content, content, content!

Create content for your site that sits in the sweet spot between your business objective and your customers’ needs. Understanding who your visitors are and where they are coming from will help you to create relevant content that answers their most burning questions and keeps them coming back to your site. This content will help to build your credibility as experts in your field, build relationships with your customers and, of course, build your search rankings to get even more traffic to your site. Don’t forget to make the content sharable, so that your customers can spread the word for you; once you’ve created this content, you can also push it out yourselves in other ways, whether via email newsletters or via social media such as on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Next time you’re on a website – perhaps you’ll be doing your online banking, or booking a hotel, or trying to find a local restaurant – we suggest you spend some time thinking about how easy it is to find the information you’re looking for, whether the design of the site helps or hinders you, and what you might learn from their mistakes. Never forget that you’re a consumer, a human being in fact, as well as a business owner or a marketer!

We’d love for you to share examples of websites that you’ve found to be particularly good, or shockingly bad, in the comments below!

 

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5 Digital Marketing New Year’s Resolutions you absolutely should keep in 2015

We’re already well into the New Year, and it’s now that all your good intentions may be beginning to falter. Are you still going to the gym? Eating that celery? Leaving work early? De-cluttering the house?

And what about in business? Did you call out any big goals or strategies for this year? Are you planning a re-stage of your website? Are you seeking to increase conversion? Are you building your organisation’s capabilities? Here are 5 New Year’s resolutions you absolutely should keep in 2015 when it comes to marketing your business…

1. Find your purpose

Consumers now are looking for much more than just a product benefit or brand name in order to give you their money and their loyalty. In fact, it’s not just consumers but employees as well: 60% of Millennials are looking for “a sense of purpose” when choosing which company to work for. Dove has been running their popular Campaign for Real Beauty since 2004, while 2014 saw the powerful Always #likeagirl campaign, which came out of research commissioned by the brand that found that 50% of girls report a drop in confidence after their first period. As an example of what not to do, just look to Victoria’s Secret perfect “body” fiasco, which led to a backlash with women responding that #iamperfect, thank you very much.

Brands like Toms and Warby Parker are also now showing that it’s possible to do good, with a social mission right at the heart of their business model, while making a profit. So what meaning can you bring to your business? What do you believe in? What’s your underlying purpose? Why should consumers care?

2. Embrace the newsroom approach

People are engaging (or not) with your brand 365 days of the year: they’re complaining on Twitter, sharing on Facebook, creating wish lists on Pinterest. Sometimes you just can’t plan ahead – remember the Oreo Superbowl #blackout? Static strategies written in PowerPoint last year will do you no good and agility is key, especially as the environment in which your business is operating is so rapidly changing. One big success of 2014 was the Adidas ‘All in or Nothing’ campaign during the World Cup. It was expensive but arguably paid off spectacularly, making it the most talked about brand and hashtag #allin while Adidas was even the sponsor for both teams in the final. The approach was also risky, and engaging real-time with consumers does bring with it any number of pitfalls: see J C Penney trying to be funny during last year’s Superbowl and Delta’s ignorance during the World Cup, or Build-a-Bear wanting to mark the anniversary of 9/11.

You may get lucky with a few interns who come up with something funny now and then, but to be really successful in real-time engagement you need a robust combination of planned, anticipated and reactive content, with a multi-functional team ready to respond with the right message at the right time.

3. Get geeky about data

In order to engage in real-time marketing, you’ll need the right information and data at your fingertips. The internet is a gold mine of customer intelligence, but companies are not yet taking full advantage of this. Attempts at re-targeting are annoying rather than helpful: adverts for products you’ve already bought, hotels you’ve already booked are following you all across the web. Then there was the case of Target congratulating a girl on her pregnancy before she had even told her parents. Oops.

Analytics are critical to understanding how your website is performing, what content people are engaging with in social, and what you should be doing to improve.

4. It’s all about integration

Consumers don’t think about your brand in silos: every interaction on desktop or mobile, Facebook or Twitter, online or offline, should be seamlessly working together as one holistic experience. If a product is out of stock, the shop assistant should be able to take you onto the website and order it online for you – likewise, when browsing an eCommerce site, you expect to see availability in your nearest store. And integration is not just about the digital and the physical world: we are also seeing a need to integrate across different parts of a business, with marketing having to align with everyone from customer service to PR to legal; work on content creation feeding into web and SEO, social media, email; different social media platforms needing to work together; and so on.

You may need to drastically think your organisation in order to address these changing needs of the business.

5. This really is the year of mobile

Every year has been called out as the year of mobile for as least the past five years if not more, and yet we’re still not reflecting this shift in our activities. Mobile has already overtaken overall desktop traffic on the internet. Half of Google’s search queries come from mobile but many websites are still not responsive for different screen sizes (Google recently a mobile-friendly testing tool for a quick check of how your site is performing). More than 70 per cent of Facebook activity is now via mobile but many brand pages have apps that only work on desktop.

It really is time now to take mobile seriously, with mobile-driven, short-form video on the rise, mobile payments becoming more and more common, and proximity messaging and hyper-targeting more and more effective.

So will you be sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions? You’d better, if you want a business that thrives in this fast-evolving digital landscape.

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Apple Names the Best Apps of 2014: So what makes a good mobile app?

Best of 2014A few days ago, Apple announced its pick of the Best Apps of 2014. Log onto your iTunes app store to see the top choices for your region. Making it onto this list, or onto others like the Best New Apps or Top Paid Apps, is becoming increasingly difficult. As of June this year, the iTunes app store had 1.2 million apps; overall, 75 billion applications had been downloaded since launch; and users were visiting the store 300 million times per week (data via TechCrunch).

So what makes a good mobile app? What are the common elements we can see across the best apps as chosen by Apple? Here are four lessons we can learn from Apple’s list of Best Apps 2014:

1. Do one thing and do it well

The most successful apps either solve a problem, or entertain. If you’re trying to do too much at the same time, you’ll most likely end up doing neither (I refer you to the Fat Daddy video fiasco on The Apprentice). Once you’ve chosen your focus, make it the best that it can be, with great visuals and user experience. The best apps list is full of examples that do that one simple thing and do it well: BBC Weather, Top10 – Hotels (does what it says on the tin), Post-it Plus (allows you to capture and organise your notes from that brainstorming session)…

When it comes to entertainment, games have always done well in the app store. The 2014 winner is Threes!, an addictive game based on a very simple 4 x 4 number grid and a swiping motion. Another game on the list, Ruzzle Adventure, has a similarly simple grid and swipe action but with letters instead of numbers. You don’t have to design the most epic of all adventure games to become popular, in fact, the simplest games are the ones that take over and have the biggest impact on productivity (i.e. by distracting workers worldwide away from their work).

2. Design for the platform and make it intuitive

Uber, the ever more popular app that lets you order a car more quickly and cheaply than a taxi, offers ‘one tap to ride’. Its functionality is simple and requires no long instruction manual: just click ‘get an uber’. An intuitive user interface ensures a fast adoption rate of your app, so that it doesn’t become one of the many million apps that are downloaded and then abandoned. A single-minded focus on the core function of the app will make it easy to use on a (usually small) smartphone screen.

Photo applications do this very well, and photo or video editing apps appear many times in Apple’s list, including the UK winner of best app overall, Replay Video Editor. Such apps are all designed specifically for the device and serve to leverage and optimise its built-in camera functionality, allowing the user to create beautiful images and videos at the touch of a few buttons and without any technical expertise. Others on the list: Camu (apply filters, add text and effects, make collages), Tunepics (add music, weather and emotions to your photos), Fly video editor, Hyperlapse, Litely, Afterlight, Cinamatic…

3. Build virality into the app itself

One new social platform included in Apple’s list is Storehouse, a ‘visual storytelling’ app. Intrinsically social apps are more likely to spread and become popular: think of Whatsapp, Instagram – their value grows the more people use them. Another more functional example on the list is AirBnB: all users benefit as the database of hosts and guests using the app (or the site) grows.

Another way to increase virality, of course, is to make sharing easy. Integrate your app with existing networks to leverage their scale; let your users post their creations, articles, results to Facebook, Twitter, or other relevant social networks; offer incentives for inviting their friends. Make virality a core part of the app’s functionality.

4. Give your users a reason to come back

Push notifications can be unwelcome when they are from an app that you don’t need to use every day; make sure you offer your users an incentive to come back the next day. Runtastic Me monitors your daily steps and activities, letting you set yourself goals and challenges that make you motivated to return. Peak Brain Training similarly sets training goals and tracks your performance over time.

Fresh content is another great way to encourage your users to return – The Guardian, Yahoo News Digest and BBC Sport are among Apple’s highlighted apps, by their very nature providing updated content on a more-than-daily basis. Users return in order to get the latest news. Ultimately, going back to the first point, people will come back if an app is incredibly useful or incredibly entertaining. What will make users return to your app again and again?

 

So did your favourite apps of 2014 make it onto the list? What makes you come back to an app again and again? Share your insights in the comments below.

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Top tips for #hashtags and how to use them with your brand

Hashtags have quickly infiltrated our communication online and even sometimes offline. Teenagers can be heard using “hashtag” even while they’re talking – satirically perhaps to start with but gradually becoming as ubiquitous as “like”, “OMG” and “fail” (and why not combine them? #fail).

The humble hashtag originated on Twitter, where it evolved organically rather than as a top-down introduction from the platform. The first one that caught on was #SanDiegoFire during the Californian wildfires of 2007. Hashtags became clickable in 2009, linking you through to all the tweets that use that particular hashtag. For the recent world cup, Twitter used the popular hashflags as well as the more obvious #WorldCup and #WorldCup2014, with 672 million tweets over the course of the championship. And you can even use hashtags for online shopping, with Amazon letting you add a product to your shopping basket by replying to a product tweet with #AmazonBasket.

Today, hashtags have spread to other social platforms. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags and they’re avidly used. Google Plus automatically proposes relevant hashtags based on the content of your post. Facebook even got in on the game last summer, though their usefulness is questionable. Not to mention Pinterest, Vine, YouTube…

So how can you leverage the power of hashtags for your business?

The most obvious place to start is with your brand.

First, your brand name: #gucci, #spanx, #sephora; or your product: #android #ipad #app.

Next what about your tagline, if you have one: KitKat does #haveabreak, Nike does #justdoit, Red Bull #givesyouwings. All of these tap into an action or lifestyle that goes beyond the brand and the product it sells.

Then you can use a campaign-specific hashtag: #thankyoumum from P&G, #gettalking from President Obama. You can focus these around events to make them even more relevant, like Adidas did with #allinformurray during Wimbledon.

Then you can introduce some commonly used tags.

#nowplaying gives your fans a glimpse behind the scenes of your office and the music you’re currently listening to.

#TBT or “Throwback Thursday” lets you share photos or titbits from your company history.

#FF With “Follow Friday“ you can recommend people for your fans to follow as well.

To tap into the real-time power of social, use trending hashtags.

As with all content, make sure you engage on topics that have a natural fit with your brand. Maybe your laundry detergent can tweet about keeping your whites white during #Wimbledon, or your make-up brand can give tips on how to get the red carpet look for the #Oscars. One brand that’s particularly good at tapping into seasonal events in a relevant way is Durex (take a look at their Facebook page for some great examples).

Don’t just jump onto a trend unless you have an authentic way to tie into it.

Other top tips:

Get creative – Go beyond the obvious and see what you can come up with. What hashtags can you create that will link into your brand but also go beyond? Some good examples are #tweetfromtheseat from Charmin toilet paper, #flosslikeaboss from Oral-B, #goddessproblems from Gillette Venus.

#Dont #go #hashtag #crazy – It’s annoying to read and it can feel very promotional. Remember Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake.  Two is probably the maximum for Twitter and Pinterest before it gets spammy.

#Keepthemshortandeasytoremember – The best hashtags are short and catchy. #CapitalisingEachWordHelps but remember that most users are not going to bother…

Read it and then read it again – The #susanalbumparty hashtag for Susan Boyle was quickly withdrawn when the team behind it realised the unfortunate consequence of running those particular words together. Make sure you research it as well, so that it’s not already being used for something else that doesn’t fit well with your brand…

Have a plan in case your campaign backfires – Hashtags have been known to be hijacked and used in a counter-productive way. When McDonalds started tweeting #McDStories about their staff, you can imagine how customers responded with their own, less positive, stories… and that conversation is still going. Make sure you have a response plan: do you retreat and go silent? Do you respond in a funny way? Do you try another hashtag instead? Yes, social conversations are happening in real time, but effective brand engagement requires careful planning.

So what hashtags are you using on your business? What are your favourites from other brands that you’ve seen? Join the conversation with your comments below!

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Content is king – or is he a dictator?

Content is king, it’s all about content, content first, content, content, CONTENT!

Yes, content is king, but as more companies, and individuals, realise this, the internet is being flooded with content that purports to add value to the user, with the ultimate aim of making a sale.

“Content is king” was the title of a 1996 article by Bill Gates in which he predicted:

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting. […] the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.”

No company is too small to participate, indeed, which is why the internet is full of bloggers, would-be experts, businesses, brands, who are pumping information out into the world. Quantity over quality?

Google Trends: "content marketing"
Content marketing as a concept has exploded onto our radar in the last few years

As individuals, we are bombarded with stimuli from all sides. At work, we receive hundreds of emails every day, we have long conference calls and go to back-to-back meetings; we read business reports, analyse share data, run consumer research, look at what competition is doing, study best practices. Privately, we’re on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr. We’re watching YouTube clips, browsing news sites, checking the weather, reading reviews on TripAdvisor, exploring Amazon’s recommendations, playing Words with Friends or Candy Crush Saga.

It’s no wonder that we start to feel overwhelmed, we get easily distracted, we struggle with making decisions.

Google Trends: "How to focus"
Searches for “how to focus” have been on a steady increase since 2007 as we try to find ways to deal with information overload…

So we develop coping mechanisms. We choose to skip video advertising that is preventing us from getting at the content we actually want to watch, we ignore banners that try to distract us from the article we’re reading, we scroll past promotional messages appearing in our news feed.

As humans – and yes, we are humans, though we may represent brands and businesses – we now have an average attention span of 8 seconds. (A goldfish, by the way, narrowly beats us at 9 seconds.) This is the window you have for catching, and holding, someone’s attention.

And you’re competing against everyone else who’s screaming for attention. You’re competing with Red Bull’s Felix Baumgartner jumping from space. With Series 4 of Game of Thrones. With Justin Bieber.

There are even businesses springing up to help us consume content more efficiently. Vine limits each video to just six seconds. Snapchat allows up to 10 seconds but then deletes it. Twitter restricts our messages to 140 characters. Circa breaks down news stories into bite-sized chunks.

It’s simply not enough to talk about your product. It’s not enough to hire a big celebrity. It’s not enough to add some hashtags.

What is it about your content that makes someone pay attention for long enough to absorb your key message? Why should they listen, why should they engage?

Next time, we’ll look at examples of how different brands have tried to address those questions in the content marketing battle for attention.

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