Internet marketing trends change from year to year. Sometimes these fast changes leave Internet marketers and small brick and mortar businesses alike scrambling to catch up. Here’s the good news. Although 2013 is nearly half over, there’s still time to implement these five internet marketing trends you don’t want to miss out on.

1. Responsive Website Design

People visit websites from a wide range of different devices. Your site needs to be accessible to as many of these viewers as possible no matter how they’re accessing your site. In other words, you need a site that flows seamlessly for people viewing on laptops, desktops, tablets, notebooks, netbooks, and mobile phones alike. That’s what responsive website design is all about, creating a site that’s friendly on all platforms. Today, it’s not a nice-to-have feature, it’s a must have.

2. Email Marketing/Remarketing

Email remarketing is one of the Internet marketing trends for 2013 that business owners from all industries can get excited about. An important component of it is contacting people who have allowed website shopping carts to expire by not taking the final steps to make the purchase. It lets your audience know you care to hear why they didn’t make the purchase to begin with. It also helps you shore up areas of concern for customers so they’re confident enough to buy from you in the future. Start off with email marketing. Launch an email campaign and publish an email newsletter to develop a relationship with your existing and prospective customers and make your email remarketing more effective.

3. Content and More Content

Of course, a voluminous amount of content alone is not enough. You need high-quality, high-value content that is relevant to your area of business, or niche, if you’re going to really capitalize on the benefit it can provide. A content management system is a great tool to help you “feed” your website with timely and regular content and is one of the most valuable of the internet marketing trends.

4. Smarter Social Media Strategy

Social media is constantly evolving. While you may be using social media, are you using it to your full advantage to capitalize on internet marketing trends for 2013? Do you have a plan and social media strategy in place? A smart social media strategy includes social listening, engagement, call to actions, advertisements and measurement. A solid social media strategy for businesses that is reassessed every year, and not just for 2013, is a wise plan for all businesses operating on the Internet today.

5. Mobile Strategy

Just as social media is growing in prominence and importance as a marketing tool, so is the usage of mobile devices by the population at large. In fact, 24 percent of Google traffic in the fourth quarter of 2012 came from mobile devices. Those numbers are only going to grow in 2013. The current worldwide audience of subscribing smartphone users is 1.1 billion people. That’s a huge market to miss out on if you don’t have a mobile website.

If you aren’t keeping up with these Internet marketing trends your business could suffer in 2013 and beyond. Now is the time to reassess your Internet marketing strategy to be sure you’re embracing the changing way the world does business today.

It started with a simple box inviting people to subscribe. Today, Geoff Bartakovics has transformed Tasting Table to a thriving newsletter with over one million subscribers. It only took four short years and a fair amount of elbow grease to do it. Not all businesses will grow to one million subscribers. But, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibilities. Here are seven reasons your business needs to publish an email newsletter beginning today.

Keeps Your Business Name Fresh in the Mind of Customers

Every single time you send out a news email “blast” or email newsletter to your subscribers you’re sending them a reminder that your business is the one that can meet their needs. Whatever business you’re in, this is advertising that keeps on giving – even if they don’t need your products or service today, your business will be the first one that comes to mind when they do because they consistently see your name in their email inboxes (whether that’s on their computer or mobile device).

Brings Customers to You Week After Week

You no longer have to wait for customers to come to your website when they need something you have to offer. Now, you can bring your website, products, and/or services to them with a few keystrokes and a click of the mouse. And – it’s instant! You don’t even need to wait on the postal services to deliver it.

Lets Your Customers Advertise for You

When you send consistently high quality email newsletters to your customers, the chances are good that they are going to share your newsletters through social media or with other friends and family who need the information, services, or goods you have to offer. They become advertisers for your business and all it took was for you to give them the tools to help you out via your email campaign.

Drives Traffic to Your Website

No matter what line of business you’re in, no matter how good you are at taking care of your business, your website isn’t going to be successful without traffic. Email marketing through a well-designed and well-thought out newsletter brings a steady stream of visitors to your site week after week. The best news is that these visitors are generally people who are already interested in the products you’re selling.

Helps You Build Relationships with Your Target Market

More importantly, email newsletters help you build trust with your target market. The more reliable and informative news you share with your audience, the more often they will turn to you for solid industry information. There really is no better way to build solid, trusting relationships with your customer base than email newsletters.

Establishes Your Business as an Industry Leader

For the people who subscribe to your newsletter, you are the voice of authority in your industry. The more information you provide them with, the more proof you’re giving them that this is the case. Give expert advice to your customers and they will keep coming back to you for more and more advice in your industry. Newsletters are, by far, the easiest way to share that advice.

Gives you the Chance to Provide a Compelling Call to Action

More importantly, it gives you this vital opportunity every time you hit the send button for your email newsletter. You’re not just sending one call to action. You’re sending calls to action to each and every newsletter subscriber on your list. And, they’ve invited you to do it. They want to hear what you have to say and when the timing and product is right, they are your most likely buyers on the World Wide Web (and sometimes off the Internet too).

Wouldn’t it be great if you could do all these things so easily? You can! We can help. Contact us today to to see how we can help you get your email newsletter up and running today so you can enjoy amazing results like these tomorrow.

Throughout the Internet you can find all manner of articles and blogs dedicated to telling you exactly what you need to do to create the perfect website design for mobile devices. You’ll hear different opinions on content, context, and outright design features that are a must for your site to be successful on the mobile web. However, few of these articles and blogs address the mobile website design issues that could be holding your site back, like these.

Overwhelming text

People who are using the mobile web are often people who are on the go. They want to look information up quickly and with as little pain in the process as possible. Don’t make them scroll through a ton of information they don’t need in order to find what they’re looking for. Less, really is more, when it comes to mobile website design content.

Use of Pop Ups

Pop ups are annoying in the best of times, and downright loathsome in the worst. On mobile devices, they can be completely problematic. It’s best to disable them altogether on your mobile website design for the convenience of users if nothing else.

Burying Your Call to Action

Mobile screens are small. Keep your call to action above the fold (in the visible screen people see when they land on your site) or your conversion rates will suffer.

Not Having a Responsive Design

Different devices are different sizes. You need to have a mobile website design that accounts and adjusts according to these variations. Failing to do so renders your content unreadable to some, if not most, of your target audience.

Links and Objects Too Close

Some fingers are fatter, flatter, or altogether less nimble than others when it comes to navigating around on their mobile devices. Placing links and objects too close together on the screen leads to a great deal of wasted bandwidth (a real problem now that so many characters have dropped their unlimited data options).

Buttons Too Small

Again the problem comes down to fingers. Not only do the buttons need to be large enough for the fingers to fit, but they also need to be spaced an appropriate distance apart so that fingers aren’t constantly tapping the button to the left or right of their intended targets.

Long, Complicated Forms

Mobile devices are portable, and are designed for people on the go. Often times people are in a hurry trying to get to the information they want in a timely, painless manner. Long, complicated forms make this impossible. Ask for as little information as possible from users if a form is absolutely necessary. If it isn’t necessary, save it for your desktop-friendly sites and skip it on the mobile websites.

Not Testing

Test, retest, and then test again. Test your site on multiple devices, multiple platforms, and in multiple conditions to ensure that your mobile website design is firing on all cylinders – not to mention providing a favorable experience for users on each of these mobile platforms.

These things are all small adjustments you can make in your mobile website design that will decrease user headaches and improve user experiences. Give them a try today and enjoy great improvements in response to your mobile sites.

At this month’s much anticipated Los Angeles User Experience Meetup event regarding Lean UX, Media Contour had the opportunity of conducting a round table interview with Lane Halley and Jaime Levy on the benefits of Lean UX strategies and practices for startups and enterprises.

Lane Halley is a digital product designer and UX facilitator at Carbon Five. Jaime Levy is a User Experience strategist and principal at JLR Interactive. She also teaches User Experience at UCLA Extension.They are both pioneers in the topics of User Experience and Lean Startups and offered innovative insight at this great event. Below is an excerpt of our round table.

LUKE: Hello. Our community consists of both agency UX’ers and designers, but also startups, small businesses and marketing teams within medium-to-enterprise level companies. I’d like to start with them. Let’s define Lean UX and discuss why it’s beneficial to their projects.

What is Lean UX?

LANE HALLEY: Lean Startup is a growing movement focused on customer understanding, experimentation, validated learning and iterative product releases which shortens product development cycles and increases the chance of product success. Lean UX combines elements of design thinking and Agile development practices. I think of Lean UX as the evolution of user experience methods which allow us to continue as UX practitioners in the modern world.

Lean UX is an alternative to the “waterfall” method of product development which involves distinct phases, handoffs and an over-emphasis on deliverable documents. By working in small validated cycles, teams can reduce risk and minimize waste in their design and development process.

Jaime Levy, Chris Chandler and Lane Halley discuss Lean UX at Cross Campus

JAIME LEVY: User Experience is typically practiced as a linear methodology with the output being a static product design document jammed with wireframes and functional specification. The biggest waste to me is the precious time that we creative professionals spend designing products that potentially nobody wants or needs.

LUKE:Reducing waste. How often do we end up at the final QA phase of a project only to find out that we should have done something another way? These realizations are often unavoidable growing pains of developing something new, but Lean UX can help businesses find out what they REALLY need earlier on.

Why is Lean UX Better for Businesses?

LANE HALLEY: The first question would be what does this business do and who is their audience? With that sort of foundation, you can better determine ways to deliver what meets your client’s needs without getting caught up in the hubris of what you think they need.

LUKE: It’s almost planning by doing. You don’t know what you need or what you’ve missed until some sort of final product is in front of you.

LANE HALLEY: Working in this kind of environment, you have to create a different kind of collaborative relationship with your client, where you become explorers together, and you have to recognize that all of your ideas are assumptions until they’re validated with happy, paying customers. This shift in consciousness and way of working based on this philosophy really does yield better results.

LUKE: Happy paying customers. I’m finding that it’s really important to get real user feedback sooner in the process and in Lean UX it’s a must.

JAIME LEVY:  I would add that getting stakeholders and users together as quickly as possible really applies in any type of work environment. For example, a technique I employ is bringing startup clients and potential users into an informal environment (i.e. a cafe) instead of a traditional focus group setting. We show the potential users a quick and dirty prototype as opposed to a polished product. This relaxes the atmosphere. It makes the interview more conversational, and we increase the likelihood of receiving both immediate and more thought-provoking feedback. I did these “guerilla”-type interviews with the CEO of TradeYa recently. He saw how the potential customers not only stumbled on the prototype but just did not understand the product’s value proposition. Because he sat in on the interviews as a notetaker, it allowed us to get on the same page more quickly and with a sharper focus toward product optimization and value innovation.

Adopting a Lean UX Philosophy

LUKE: Let’s shift back to agency life. For teams unfamiliar with Lean UX, how can they start implementing the Lean UX method into their practices?

LANE HALLEY: It’s really about changing the relationship between the client and the team that’s doing the production and design. The first thing is to make talking to users an ongoing part of your process. It’s not a special occasion and it’s not just at the end of the process. It’s about continual user engagement, constantly mixing that conversation into the project, and engaging the people who are making the decisions in that process too. Step two is really empowering and aligning the team around a shared vision. We use a technique at Carbon Five called “design studio.” It’s a collaborative design session facilitated by a designer where everyone sits down with pencil and paper and sketches solutions to the problem. This is a great way to get the right conversation flowing around the product that is being created.

JAIME LEVY: Well, it’s so dependent on the client because a lot of times clients come in and already have a specific idea for something. It’s also really important to do market research so you know what direct competitors are doing so you can consider what’s being done outside of that particular vertical in terms of feature concepts. This allows for new ways of approaching things and problem solving. Oftentimes, you need to shift the mental model of how a product works to something totally different. Lean UX advocates for UX practitioners to ask clients about who they think are their customers and what problems they are actually trying to solve. But UX Strategy is about balancing the validated solution against smart market research so you can find new opportunities to exploit.

Conclusion

Lean UX is defining a problem and then finding a solution by doing. By getting started, you provide your team with the opportunity to catch missing functionality that you couldn’t of otherwise caught without some type of prototype. It’s also about getting customers in front of your project as soon as possible to learn as much as you can about real user interaction.

You can start practicing Lean UX by bringing together collaborative teams and giving them tools to create working prototypes. These prototypes do not have to be complex. At our studio we use a combination of marker boards, paper sketches and Balsamiq Mockups to create working prototypes with your clients and their customers.

2013 offers exciting possibilities for business across the globe. Following the right website design trends can help change the course of your business in the coming year and beyond. These are a few of the hottest trends going on right now for website design

Responsive Web Design

People are surfing the web from multiple platforms these days. You need to design your site so viewers can access them, in a uniform layout, from whichever devices they’re using, whether it’s laptops, smartphones, tablet devices, or desktop PCs. This means you give your visitors an optimal viewing experience with minimum panning, resizing, or scrolling across a wide range of devices. Sites like Mashable.com and BostonGlobe.com are already doing it with excellent results. The better able your site is to manage multiple formats, the more attractive it will be to the overall Internet audience you’re courting. Responsive design is also convenient for people who resize their windows when browsing the Internet as the layout automatically adjusts to the window’s size.

Fixed Header Bar

The fixed header bar is not so new even though it’s one of the hotter website design trends for 2013. We’re simply seeing it used on more and more websites as the convenience of this tool for visitors gains more notoriety in design circles. Twitter, is an excellent example of a fixed header bar. As readers scroll down the page, they have access to all the navigational support of the header bar. This means they don’t need to scroll all the way back to the top of the page for navigational purposes.

Social Media Icons and Badges

We live in a social world. Websites today must make it easier than ever before for viewers to share posts and pages. Social media badges and buttons are top tools in the website design trends for the coming year because they make sharing so simple. BlogHer.com is just one of many websites that uses badges for popular social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Sparkle, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and Google +. Don’t forget about other ways to engage customers by including icons to your RSS feed, YouTube videos, or Instagram page.

High-Quality Content and Illustrations

Quality will forever be the secret for success when it comes to website content. It’s a good thing that website design trends have finally caught up to this inescapable truth. Sites like Gizmodo.com and Cnet.com offer a great deal of quality content and pictures to go along with the information they provide. Infographics are also becoming a popular tool to combine quality content with illustrations.

Infinite Scrolling

This is a very popular feature as far as many website users are concerned and in terms of website design trends. It allows them the ability to scroll down one page in search of data and information rather than clicking through multiple pages to find the information. It creates a seamless experience. The real beauty is that it doesn’t even slow things down as you scroll down the page. Pinterest and Twitter both use infinite scrolling with great success.

Stay ahead of the competition by incorporating these website design trends into your websites. 2013 is sure to become a banner year for your business as a result.

Whether you’ve decided that it’s time to redesign your website, or perhaps you’re embarking on your very first business website design, your website is a vital part of building your brand and business, both online and off. Either way, here are 5 strategies to get more traffic to and customers from your website.

Be strategic. 

In other words, know your website’s goals, both primary and secondary. The more clearly defined your website’s goals, the easier it is for your website designer, copywriter, and blogger to meet these goals. What is the main purpose of your website? Is it to gain leads, sell products, attract new clients, ask you for a free quote request, sign up for your newsletter, provide product and service support to reduce phone calls, or read your blog a few times a week?

Make it user friendly. 

Are your visitors able to interact with your website in a way that is meaningful to them? Intuitive navigation, easily recognizable hyperlinks, strategic information design, optimized search function, scannable and readable text, fast page load times, functioning keyboard shortcuts, and good use of white space are all features of a user-friendly website design.

Make it mobile friendly. 

According to GoMo News, 25 percent of mobile only internet browsers rarely or never browse the web using their desktop. Think with Google further reports that by 2015, more individuals in the U.S. will access the internet through their mobile device than through a desktop personal computer. What’s more, one in five mobile website visits leads to a user taking action. Building a mobile compatible website while also avoiding elements that frustrate mobile users is critical for businesses to take advantage of the exploding mobile world we live in today.

Incorporate fresh and captivating content. 

Regularly supplying your website visitors with fresh and engaging content will incite visitors to return to your site again and again. Encourage comments or participation in polls to have your visitors interact more with your site. Utilize a call to action to ask for blog or newsletter subscribers, provide captivating high quality images, and be sure to integrate social media into your website and blog. Whether it’s your blog, product updates, galleries, multimedia, or company or industry news, deliver useful, entertaining, and valuable information — consistently.

Utilize analytics. 

At the very least, get to know Google Analytics, which your professional web designer can provide and incorporate into your website. This insightful tool can tell you what pages on your site your visitors are reading, how long they are staying, where they are located, what browser or device they are using, what their entry and exit pages are, and so much more. Learning more about your visitors and their behaviors can help you better target them.

None of these business website design strategies are a quick fix. They require effort, persistence, and time. But the investment not only provides cumulative benefits, but also takes your business to the next level.

Among the most successful business and corporate websites out there are those that manage to incorporate blogs and social media into their overall web presences. Doing so requires quite a bit of thought. It also requires diligence. These three elements can mix very well, but you do need to make certain that you exercise a bit of control.

Overly Personal

Back in the day when newspapers were the primary venues for getting information about business out there, public relations firms would constantly send press releases to reporters about promotions within a business, personnel who had won some sort of award and other like stories. More often than not, these press releases got ignored. The reason is simply that most people aren’t interested in this type of information about a company.

One of the best ways to utilize blogs and social media presences is to tie them into the corporate websites and to make certain that it’s all business. To put forward a more human face for the company, consider offering value rather than uninteresting information. For example, people will be much more interested in getting some technical information about a product that your company sells than they will about who got an award for being a particularly reliable employee.

Controlling the Message

Message control is a big part of public relations. If you have a blog set up, make certain that the company that sets it up for you gives you ways to control the posts that visitors make and the posts that the people actually filling the blog make. There should be some sort of approval process for both. Where people making the updates are concerned, it prevents blog posts from going up that may reflect negatively on the company. Where user comments are concerned, controlling the comments prevents the blog from becoming filled up with spam. Web designers can provide you with both automated and manual ways of achieving these goals for corporate websites.

Social media, blogs and corporate websites can all be linked together and can function very well as a coordinated effort. There still needs to be some level of control exercised over all of them, however. At the very least, you should have technically savvy marketing people in charge of these endeavors and make certain that there is accountability built into the system. This can prevent embarrassments, accidental leaks of proprietary information and other pitfalls from becoming issues.

In any field involving design, there will always be trends. Sometimes, these trends offer easy ways for designers to make certain that one of their creations looks contemporary. In other cases, these trends are destined to be short-lived and may not really offer anything to the end result. Website updates generally will follow some dominant design trends in the Internet world but, that being said, it’s important to understand what types of website trends may constitute wastes of time and money.

Layout Trends

Today’s websites tend to be much more content rich on a page by page basis than were the websites of the past. In fact, multicolumn designs allow website designers to pack pages full of information.  This is an example of an effective website trend. When this is done right, your website visitors won’t have to click through a lot of different pages to get to the information they want. When it’s done incorrectly, your visitors won’t be able to figure out what part of the page they should be looking at to find what they’re after.

If you are expanding your website from a one-or two-column designed to a multicolumn design, make certain that you’re doing so in a way that makes life easier for your visitors, not more complicated.

Graphic Trends

One of the very noticeable website trends in design over the last few years is that graphics have become more functional than they ever were before. For instance, rather than having a pretty picture on a page to keep visitors interested, most images on webpages these days are very specific to the content on the rest of the page. For businesses, rather than looking for a nice image to put on a webpage, the current trend – and this has been a trend for a while – is to utilize the branding theory as much as possible in image selection.

Branding is an example of a good website trend as far as design is concerned. It comes from the accumulated knowledge that marketers and businesses have built up over years of being on the Internet now.

Too Trendy

Remember not to get too trendy with your website design. You may notice that a lot of websites are starting to adopt a particular design style that appeals to you. Your website designer can help you to take advantage of what’s good about these website trends but, if they’re a very good website designer, they will also show you how you can be different and original at the same time.

According to many different sources, the percentage of overall webpage views made on mobile devices goes up year after year. It’s important to understand what a mobile device is for most of the people who own one. They might not be surfing the Internet in the traditional fashion but they are most certainly visiting webpages, seeking information and performing many of the same tasks that they could only do at their desktop computers before mobile devices became Internet-enabled. This means that making your site mobile compatible is, indeed, a priority if you’re serious about reaching out to people.

Is it Complicated?

There are, in the broadest sense, two ways that you can go about making your site mobile compatible. One way is to use a responsive design. This means that your website will detect what type of device it is being viewed on and that it will automatically adjust the size and orientation of the elements on the page to make your page more accommodating to the smaller screens on mobile devices. The second way  to ensure that your site is mobile compatible, is to have a separate mobile site developed by a web designer. Either provides a workable solution.

Using the mobile site isn’t any more complicated than using your regular site. There’s nothing that the user needs to do. In fact, you can verify this for yourself by visiting just about any well-known site on a mobile device and then visiting it on your desktop computer. You’ll notice that, when you show up on your mobile device, you get a differently formatted webpage than you do when you show up on your desktop computer. Selecting the appropriate site is done automatically for you.

Choices

Well-designed mobile compatible websites generally do give the user the option of viewing the full desktop site, if they so choose. Users on devices with larger screens, such as tablet computers, may well choose to visit the full site, as the usability is not compromised by their device in any regard. Offering the choice, however, is important. Your users should have the option to use the mobile site.

Mobile device usage is going up very quickly. At the same time, the speed of mobile carrier Internet connections is increasing and more people are choosing to have Internet access on their phones. This means that, to be ready for the future, you do have to have some sort of mobile compatible site set up as an option for your visitors.

If you’re going to update your website, one of the things you’re going to want to do for certain is to take advantage of what social media has to offer. There are some elements of social media websites that are vastly overblown in terms of how their advertising potential is described. There are other elements of the sites, however, where the realities do live up to the hype. Here are some of the feeds you will definitely want to have connected to or displayed directly on your own website.

Image Feeds

Flickr and other image sharing websites can sometimes be added to your own website in the form of a stream. If you happen to be a photographer, this is a sensible and useful addition to your website. Many photographers use these websites because it allows them to store a huge number of photos online without having to have those photos stored on their own server. Ask your website designer about having your photo feeds included when you update your website.

Twitter

Twitter is definitely a service that you will want to include as you update your website, if you use it for your business. Twitter is used by many businesses to offer customers coupons, promotional offers and real-time information about what’s available at their retail establishment, restaurant or eCommerce site. Remember that some of your visitors may be visiting your website but not following your Twitter feed. If this is the case, including that feed on your website enables you to get more out of the money and time you spend updating it.

Facebook

You will most certainly want to post any content that you put on your Facebook newsfeed on your website, as well. You’ll also want to make certain that you make it easy for people to share your website content on their Facebook news feeds. Having this sort of cross connectivity between Facebook and your website can be enormously useful. It also helps you to keep Facebook useful for advertising, as some changes to the terms of service for businesses have made it more difficult for businesses to reach out to their followers without paying.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is so strongly associated with people’s professional lives that you will definitely want to include this when you update your website, as well. If you have a LinkedIn profile, it should be easy for your visitors to get to it from your website. Your website designer can take care of this for you when you update your website.

There was once a time when updating a website – even doing a very minor update – required you to have a working knowledge of HTML. That time has long since passed. Today, website designers can provide you with ways to update your own site using a content management system that makes it just as easy as updating the newsfeed on your social media profile or updating your Twitter feed. Here’s how it works.

Content Management Systems

Content management systems are backend features for websites that make it easy to add content to pages. They include well-known names such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others. These content management systems give you an interface that is very similar to what you see when you update a social media feed.

Using a content management system properly does require a few steps. For instance, before you add written content to your website, you’ll want to write that content into a word processing program, so that you can do a spell check, proofread it and take all the other necessary editing steps before you actually put it online. There are simple proofreading features built into many content management systems, but it’s still a good idea to use a word processor first.

Efficiency

A content management system also provides a great deal of efficiency. For example, with a good content management system, you can actually upload a great deal of content and have it posted on a schedule. This completely automates the process. This is a great way to cut down on the amount of work that people have to do to keep your website updated and, of course, it’s also a great way to make certain that any vital information you need to have posted on your website on a particular day isn’t overlooked.

A good web designer can integrate content management into your website. This allows you to update your content whenever you need to without having to worry about ruining any of the code that underpins your site. It also allows you to spend your money with web designers on updates that are complicated and that require the services of a professional, rather than having to contract a web designer to do very minor updates on your site. Using these systems, it really is just as easy to update your website content as it is to add more information to your newsfeed, your social profile or any other social media feed.

It’s safe to say that, when most people think about web design, they think about appearances more than they think about anything else. Web designers do far more than make an attractive website for their clients, however. It’s also safe to say that most people are probably aware of the fact that some websites are dangerous to visitors. A good web developer can make certain that your website does not pose a risk to your visitors and implement techniques to prevent against hacking as you update your website.

Avoiding the Dangers of DIY Sites

Some companies and individuals who have websites set up for business purposes try to have the website designed in the house or try to do it on their own. Designing a modern website is a task that requires the skills of several different types of people. This is also the case as far as the effort and team needed to update your website.  Graphic designers work on the looks of the site, developers work on the code and other professionals handle their own elements of the site.

When people try to do it themselves, they oftentimes end up using premade plug-ins and other features to increase the interactivity on their site. The problem with this is that the people adding these features oftentimes don’t understand web programming enough to know when there installing something that could pose a threat to their visitors. Some of the worst threats on websites don’t come from the website that the person is actually looking at: they come from websites that are linked to through malicious add-ons or advertisements. Good web designers can help you avoid falling victim to this as you update your website, and prevent you from getting a reputation as someone with a dangerous website.

Membership Sections

For any type of business, one of the worst possible public relations events is having your member’s credentials stolen by hackers. The people who steal this information sometimes go as far as to offer it for sale on certain websites.

A good website designer can make certain when you update your website that your website is secure, rather than just appearing to be secure. Understand that security is an ongoing effort.. Security isn’t a goal that you reach, it’s a constant battle between security experts and the hackers trying to exploit people who use websites. With a good web designer, you can make certain that your website is always updated so that it is ready to handle the latest security threats out there.

As is the case with most security issues, website security comes down to knowledge. When you are ready to update your website or if you’re having a website newly built , be sure you’re using a knowledgeable firm.

If you’re not a particularly technical person, it’s always a little bit intimidating to go into the offices of a service provider and discuss what you need. If you are looking to update your website, here are some things you can do to make the process easier and to facilitate better communication with your website designer, ensuring that all of your needs are met and that the website designers themselves are aware of those needs.

Meet In-House First

If you don’t own and operate a website on your own, there are probably quite a few people involved in maintaining your website. You want to make certain that you meet with all of these people first so that they can voice any concerns they have so these are taken in to account when you update your website. In particular, talk to the people who are responsible for updating your website. You need to know if they are having any issues that are making work difficult for them that can be resolved as you update your website.

Survey

If you’re already working with a website designer, consider asking them to put a small survey on your site so that you can ask your visitors themselves what they would like to see changed about your website. This is a great way to get some ideas as to what you need the web designers to do as you update your website. Most web designers can add such an element to your website fairly easily and it would be well worth the modest cost to do this, particularly if your website is a venue for delivering products and services.

Write Down Ideas

When you have a good idea, write it down or e-mail it to the designer so that you don’t forget to bring it up. It’s a lot easier to spend a little bit of extra time meeting with the web designer and bring up all of your ideas than it is to start throwing ideas at them after they’ve already started developing your site.

Remember not to be intimidated when you go to meet your web designer. You don’t have to be technically versed in how websites work to get what you need out of the web design firm. All you need to be able to do is to give them some solid ideas about what how you want to update your website, be ready to take in some new information about how those ideas will be realized and to keep in a creative frame of mind when you’re dealing with the web design firm.

The display quality of desktop computers, mobile devices and just about everything with the screen on it is increasing constantly. Lately, HD and retina displays have become standard features on just about every new device. These displays have some beautiful resolution. Watching videos on them is amazing compared to what it was before the new generation of displays hit the market. The iPad and other Apple mobile devices, in particular, are known for their tremendous display quality. This has some important implications for when you update your website.

Old Graphics Don’t Cut It

Some companies have been using the same graphics for many years, porting them to their new websites when they have them redesigned. This worked very well for quite a while but, with the new display qualities available, older graphics tend to look rather amateurish and shouldn’t be reused when you update your website. Updating a website isn’t a one-size-fits-all procedure. Some companies will only need content updated or maybe a few features added here and there. Other companies, however, particularly those who have been recycling a lot of their content over the course of several updates, may want to take a serious look at updating the graphics.

The danger in having dated graphics on a website is that it tends to make the entire website look cheap. No matter how much work was put into layout, navigation and all the other elements that make a website excellent, the presence of graphics that look pixelated, that have gaudy or ill-chosen colors and that have ragged pixels where smooth lines should be will inevitably detract from the visitor experience.  Take this in to strong consideration when you are ready to update your website.

Working with a Designer

A web designer may very well want to revamp your graphics when you update your website, nearly from scratch. They may want to put bitmap graphics into a format called scalable vector graphics, which allow the graphical elements of your website to be enlarged or reduced in size without any loss of quality. It’s hard to convey just how much of an advance in web design capabilities this is. One of the biggest hindrances to getting excellent results that graphic designers faced was the fact that much of their work would end up degrading in quality when it was expanded or reduced into different screen resolutions and screen sizes. Today, the scalable vector graphics offer a good solution for a world where mobile devices are rapidly becoming almost as popular as desktop computers for browsing the Internet.

A great deal of your website impact is based on what visitors see. As you update your website, take into account that today’s monitors, mobile devices and other screens allow visitors to see a whole lot more than they used to be able to.

Spam is one of the greatest threats to your website.  Luckily, there are strategies you can employ to help fight spam as you update your website.  Today, there are more types of spam than there were in the past. In the past, the term referred specifically to unsolicited commercial e-mails, but today it refers to blog posts that are designed to advertise something rather than to inform or entertain, pages that provide links to sites that have no value to the person clicking them and to other online scams that trick people into clicking on something that is malicious, deceptive or otherwise undesirable.

Fighting against spam oftentimes employs technological and human solutions. Here are some basics that you should understand.

Form Spam

Sometimes, spammers will use web forms as ways to propagate their schemes. The best way to fight against this as you update your website is by using what’s called a captcha. A captcha is something you’ve probably seen before. It consists of an image that contains text that the bots that spammers use cannot read. In order to submit a form, the user has to fill in a field that verifies that they’re human beings by proving that they can read the letters in the captcha. A website designer can implement these on your site very easily as you update your website.

Forum/Blog Spam

Spamming forums and blogs is one of the most established ways that spammers go about their business. The way it works is that they will post a reply to something posted on the blog or forum and fill that reply with links to sites that they make money off of or thinly concealed advertisements for products. Sometimes, the links will go to sites that present a genuine hazard to the people who visit them. It’s important to control this.

Depending on what type of blogging technology you use, your website designer will be able to install automatic systems that look for spam and eliminate it when they find it as you update your website. These, however, are only part of the solution. The other part of the solution is human control over what goes up on the blog. Having posts reviewed and replies reviewed before they go online is the best solution to this. Your website designer can set you up with a system that makes it easy enough to do.

If your website gets a reputation as a place where people are at risk due to spam, they’re going to quit showing up to it. It might be because of irritation or a legitimate concern for their safety. As a website owner, you should take advantage of any technological and procedural methods of controlling and eliminating spam and employ these when you update your website.

There is a great deal of marketing information these days that has to do with social media. In fact, social media, in some regards, is being played up to the extent that businesses may be becoming a bit too grand in their expectations of what it can do. It’s important to remember that the website you actually own is much different than any social media site in an important regard: you have complete control over it. If you’re updating your website, you may want to do so while keeping in mind that you can update your website in a way that takes social media into account but that does not make your entire marketing effort dependent upon social media.

News Feeds

The general consensus about direct advertising on social media websites is that it’s not worth the money. Advertisement on social media sites gets very low return on investment figures, in the vast majority of cases. Businesses quickly found out, however, that they could get good results by updating their newsfeeds with information about their products. Facebook has since adopted a paid system that has taken away the ability to do this for free.

You can update your website with features that allow you to push updates on your website to your social media feed. Depending upon what type of program you’ve taken advantage of from your social media account providers, these feeds may or may not be visible to the people who follow you. They will, however, be visible on your website. By making the website the main venue for the information that you are putting out, you’re putting that information out in an environment where you have complete control over the advertising ecosystem.

Like and Share

As you update your website, it’s a very good idea to have any website updates you undertake include updates that allow your visitors to share or like your posts easily. People do this almost reflexively these days when they find something interesting. If you want to take advantage of this somewhat Pavlovian response to things that people like, make sure your web designer includes “Like” or other sharing icons when you update your website so that people can share your content. You will most certainly want the “Follow us on…” links on your site, as well, so people can add you to their friends list without having to hunt you down on the social media site itself.

When choosing to update your website for social media compatibility, convenience is a major factor in the usefulness of any update.

Poor website design can make your website look outdated. There are very real consequences to this. For example, if a customer has the option of shopping on your website or a website that looks much more current, it’s likely that they’re going to pick the current site. Here are some ways that web design can make your company look as outdated as your website and the importance of refreshing your design as you update your website.

Security Issues

Everybody who uses the Internet understands that security is a major issue. When your website looks outdated, it’s a natural conclusion for people that your security is probably outdated, as well. If they’re asked to enter their credit card number on a page that looks like it was designed in 1997, they’ll likely have some justifiable hesitation.  This why it’s important to update your website with a fresh design.

Keeping your site fresh looking gives the impression that your company spends a lot of time developing and redeveloping what they put on the web. If you have a well-designed, modern site, it’s a lot easier for people to have confidence in it.  Keep this in mind when you are ready to update your website.

Never Updated

Websites that look like they have never been updated make it look like the company may well be out of business. If they don’t give that impression directly, there’s still a good chance that they give the impression that your company is probably one person working out of a basement or something similar. Keeping your site fresh with a new design as you update your website ensures that people know that your website is, in fact, updated regularly and that your business is very much alive. Having an outdated website makes your business look like it failed a long time ago and that it might not be the most reliable choice to do business with.

No One There

Outdated websites also make it look like a company may be a truly fly-by-night affair. Most companies these days spend a lot of time keeping their websites up to date. If you have an outdated website, it looks like you’re not even taking care of this, very basic, requirement of doing business in the 21st century. This is the last impression that you want to make with customers.

Outdated websites, make no mistake about it, make your business look bad. You don’t have to put out the cash to have a huge website built or to update your website effectively.  Simply having a web designer make a few improvements here and there and bring your site up to more modern standards can go a long way toward making the right impression on customers.

Last week, Janine Warner (@janinewarner), self-described Digital Alchemist, presented Understanding Content Strategy to the Southern California Web Designers & Developers MeetUp group at Huge, Inc.’s new LA Office. Janine gave us a top level look at Content Strategy. Below you will find a brief overview of her presentation and a few links to resources that can help you with your content strategy.

After Janine’s presentation, I was able to sit down with her and talk a little more about the Los Angeles design community, helping clients create content and how we can become better at Content Strategy. Read the interview →

What is a Content Strategist?

According to Janine, a Content Strategist might be a 6-7 headed mythological creature that is likely an ambitious kapelophile. Or in the real world… a Content Strategist is a person who can wear multiple hats through the content creation process. Experts in the Content Strategy field help plan, organize, manage, and create content for websites and other projects. Content Strategists work with clients to discover the best way to communicate key messages that best serve company goals. They also keep the projects on track.

Tools of the Trade

Keeping tabs on a site’s content strategy can be a daunting task that really comes down to organization. Janine showed us some of the tools Content Strategists use to keep everything in check.

Flow Charts

Also known as site maps, flow charts outline how a user will navigate a website. This is also a good way to track of all your pages in the structure of your website. On big projects, content strategy professionals will usually work closely with an information architect to create flowcharts or site maps. On smaller sites, a content strategist may be expected to do this task as part of managing content integration.

The flow chart above was created with MindMap, a free mind-mapping tool.

Content Inventory

Most content strategists start a project by conducting a content inventory, a detailed document designed to assess the current content on a site and to keep track of each page’s content, importance and overall goal. It can also be used as a checklist to make sure nothing was missed.

Check out Maadmob’s free template to get started with your content inventory.

Gap Analysis

A Gap Analysis is a great way to find out what is missing on your website and what actions are needed to take place to fill those ‘gaps.’ It generally involves sitting down with the client, the Content Inventory and your client’s goals for the website. Is everything listed in the Content Inventory facilitating those goals? If not, add it to the Gap Analysis worksheet and assign team members to fill in the gaps.

Crafting Content for the Web

Source: http://www.digitalfamily.com/tutorials/content-strategy-the-inverted-pyramid/

Using a similar approach to journalism, the content strategy for the web should be developed in the model of the inverted pyramid, a technique that prioritizes the most important content first rather than in chronological order. Similarly, Janine recommends that you limit each paragraph to one idea and write headlines that clearly convey the meaning of the story and include keywords for better search engine optimization.

3 Seconds or Less

As web designers, we often fall victim to knowing our clients too well. In the process of working with a client, we should get clear on their goals and their backstory. But never forget that visitors may not see a webpage the same way as you do. Janine recommends a 3-second test. Show your website to friends and potential visitors and make sure they can identify the goal and purpose of the site in 3 seconds or less. Make sure that headline says what your client does!

Don’t Forget the 404!

When was the last time you redesigned a 404 page? If you are a designer, Janine hopes you respond with, “Last project!” The 404 page is one of the most overlooked and underrated pages on a website. Done well, the 404 page can serve as an opportunity to demonstrate your client’s voice and even be a bit silly if the mood calls for it. You can also create a better user experience by giving the site’s visitors the option to search for new content or to visit a new page.

Find more inspiration at http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/35-creative-404-error-pages

You can watch Janine’s course on Content Strategy on Lynda.com at http://www.lynda.com/Web-User-Experience-tutorials/Creating-Effective-Content-Strategy-Your-Website/109764-2.html.

Or visit her website at http://www.digitalfamily.com to learn more about her books, videos, and consulting services, as well growing collection of free tutorials on web design.

Lastly, I would like to thank Mario Noble (@mndtwit), the organizer of Southern California Web Designers and Developers, for putting on this event. I recommend checking out his next event. No matter what your level expertise you will get something out of it. And, Mario is always great for a good laugh. Thanks Mario!

Janine Warner recently presented Understanding Content Strategy to the Southern California Web Designers & Developers MeetUp group at Huge, Inc.’s new office in LA. After her presentation, I was able to sit down with her and talk a little more about LA, helping clients create content and how we can become better at content strategy.

Tell our readers a little bit about what you do.

I’m an author, web designer, content strategist… like many people in this business, I wear many hats. I am also the creator of digitalfamily.com which is an interactive design and training agency.

Your site has a lot of great content targeted towards small and medium-sized businesses.

Thanks. I created DigitalFamily.com to provide additional resources to people who buy my books and training videos and now it gets quite a bit of traffic on its own. Most of the content is basic web design 101, but you’ll also find tips on social media and, of course, content strategy. Because I’m the author of every edition of Dreamweaver For Dummies, you’ll also find a large collection of tutorials on Adobe Dreamweaver. It’s a good place for clients to begin their journey in web design and a place where I help people who want to create their own websites on important topics such as content strategy.

Are there advantages to working with small businesses?

In many ways the smaller clients are the most fun to work with because they haven’t figured out their content yet and that’s really where you get to do your best work if you’re into content strategy.

Sometimes it allows for more creative direction as well.

Definitely.

We see that you’re a fellow Angeleno. How do you use the city to motivate your work.

I often say Los Angeles is a city that you can choose to love or hate and I choose to love it. What I most love about LA is the diversity and the vibrancy, the great museums, the art scene and the creative talent you find here in every shape and form. And in large part because I run my own business, I get to choose where I get to live and work and I don’t have to commute every day in LA traffic! [laughs] That definitely makes people hate LA! I avoid rush hour whenever possible!

You’ve written a lot of books about the Internet. How has writing helped you become am expert in content strategy?

I studied journalism, and I remember one of my professors said, “If you want to be a great writer, the first thing you have to do is write hundreds of thousands of sentences. It almost doesn’t matter what those first two hundred thousand sentences are about. It’s more of a right of passage.” So after writing 25 books, I think finally know how to write [laughs]. I say that with great humility and passion for writing!

“If you want to be a great writer, the first thing you have to do is write hundreds of thousands of sentences…”

I call myself a journalist turned geek. I went from being a traditional reporter to being really interested in the internet, and then I realized that most people as techy as I am couldn’t write very well —some couldn’t communicate their expertise at all, so I found a niche for myself somewhere between technology and journalism, and that set me up well to become an expert in content strategy today.

If you can bridge the worlds of writing and technology, content production and development, and you understand something about multimedia and all the different forms of storytelling that exist today, you are in a really good position to work as a content strategist and guide the creation of content in the increasingly complicated world of content design and publishing.

I received similar advice from an art teacher, “First make 10,000 paintings and give them away to your friends. Once you’re done with that, you can then become an artist.”

[Laughs] So it sounds like we received similar advice. For me, there were two parts to it. One, it was great practice. But the other is maybe more related to my profession today in that much of working in technology is about learning new things all the time. In a funny way, writing books gave me an opportunity to go deep into a topic and thoroughly study it so that I could write a book about it. Writing books has afforded me the time to get new expertise that I could later use with clients and apply in my own business.

So the fact that I spend about half my time writing books, creating training videos, and teaching — and the half working with clients and doing fairly technical development myself works well for me. That way I’m constantly learning new things as an author, writer, researcher and constantly testing those theories out in practice with real clients.

Starting content for a new website can be intimidating. Where does one start for optimizing content strategy?

All big tasks are best done when broken down into little pieces. The same is true for content strategy.  The first thing I do with a client is sit down and put together a production schedule with a lot of milestones. And one of the things I learned early on was that content development had to be started early in the process. I usually take a three-pronged approach to developing a website. One of them is getting the content started, the other is design, and third, developing the technology and programming. Some people wait to do the content until after the design and technology have been finished, but I think that is one of the biggest mistakes in web design. You really should be thinking about the content strategy from the start.

I think a lot of why content strategy is getting more attention today is that people are starting to realize that you need to think of content up front and the best websites are designed with a very holistic approach, developing some content and getting started with the message — what are the key things we need to get in — and then designing around that content so you create a design and content strategy that work well together.

“Some people wait to do the content after the design and technology have been finished, but I think that is one of the biggest mistakes in web design.”

Did I answer your question about getting clients started? [Laughs[ Content isn’t free and doesn’t grow on trees. There is an investment in time that someone has to make. But I think breaking it down into pieces can be helpful when it comes to content strategy.

In last night’s presentation you suggested having the client get away from the office when they’re having trouble writing content. When content creation stalls, how do you get the ball rolling again?

When you get the client away to a place without all the distractions, having a list of interview questions can help. I’ve seen this with videos, biographies and websites, if you just start by “What goes on the website?” the client kind of gets lost, or if you point a camera at someone and say, “Talk!”, it’s really hard to do. But, if you feed them some questions and just start a conversation, you can bring out those gems that can help start to shape the heart of the most important content.

So I’ve developed questionnaires that I use with clients. For example, What are your top goals? Who are you customers? What do you want people to do as a result of visiting your website? And the more specific you get with those questions the more you start walking them through a process that leads to creating content that is the most valuable for their site and a successful content strategy. If you can capture some of their answers in an interview format, then with a little editing and revising, you can massage it into content that you can use on the website.

“Clients need deadlines…”

One more thing. This might seem obvious, but client’s need deadlines the way everyone else does. Sometimes we think the client is boss and we should follow their lead, but most clients need to know that content strategy and creating content is an important part of the process. From my experience, client’s benefit when deadlines are set for them.

I will set up a schedule with milestones then I will reassure them that all they need by the first deadline is the first draft. It takes them off the hook just a little bit so that they can get something out, knowing that it doesn’t have to be perfect. One of the misconceptions for people have that haven’t written hundreds of thousands of sentences, is that they think it has to come out perfect the first time. It rarely does. The best writers revise and revise, and then have really good editors revise their writing some more. If writing and editing is not your skill set, consider hiring a writer or editor to help them.

If you’re not a professional writer you may underestimate how much everything you read has been edited. Every book I write has 3 or 4 editors that work on it with me. There is a technical editor who reviews all the technical aspects, a copy editor who makes sure everything is spelled right and that the commas are in the right place. Then there is a product editor who looks at the overall message and makes sure it is appropriate for the audience. And finally there is a proof reader who gives it a final review.

On small websites, most people don’t have a team like that. But leverage whatever you have. For example, get the administrative assistant to write the first draft, then have a good editor go over it, and finally let the client review it.
Part of being a Content Strategist is being able to training other people how to create good content. If there is no one on your team with writing and editing experience, you may need to find a freelancer to fill in that gap and part of what you may want them to do for you as part of the content strategy is to teach others how to develop content, too.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. We like to give our readers a tip they can take to work with them tomorrow. What advice would you give our readers to become better at content strategy?

One of the best ways to become a better writer and to become experiences in content strategy is to read a lot. A great way to make better websites is to look at a lot of websites and really study what they do right and where they fail. Companies like Apple and Mint have done a pretty solid job of summarizing complex concepts in a few words, illustrating them visually, and walking their audience through the points that tell their stories quickly and succinctly. Seeing how other content developers distill complex messages into a few works is a powerful way to learn to develop great content yourself. Just like readying a lot of fiction is a great way to write a better novel.

“Companies like Apple and Mint have done a pretty solid job of summarizing complex concepts in a few words, illustrating them visually and walking their audience through the points that tell their stories quickly and succinctly.”

It is very easy for us as web designers to get caught up in the projects we’re doing and forget that we should go out and surf the web every once in a while. One of the reasons I got my iPad is so that I can get away from my desk and sit and search and read and think and study for a while. It’s a very import part of keeping your skills up-to-date and integral to optimizing content strategy for any project.

Practice through imitation. Is there anything you would like to add that we haven’t covered?

Content Strategy is a hot new job category and a hot new term people are talking about, but it’s a skill a lot of people have had for a long time and a skill that has been evolving for a long time. You’ve probably been doing this for a while, but just didn’t have a name for it.

“It’s a pretty cool career for a lot of people.”

One of the things to recognize about content strategy is that it is an emerging specialty because it is increasingly needed, increasingly important and increasingly complicated because we have so many different kinds of content and publishing channels today.
But at its core, the skill set of content strategy is relevant for an audience is what a lot of us have honed over the years and many people do in related professions. Since a lot people in web and digital design come from the world of print or broadcast media, they bring these skills already they just don’t necessarily recognize that they and many are already pretty qualified for a Content Strategist position. They might just need to supplement what they know about content strategy with a little more understanding, a little more vocabulary, a little more experience, a little more thinking about how you tell a story in multimedia. It’s a pretty cool career for a lot of people.

Being in charge of content strategy and creation also brings you in a little earlier in the process. Being able to orchestrate all these pieces gives you a lot of creative opportunities.

In my own experience, projects that had someone in charge, whether it be the project manager, art director or an administrative assistant, typically were more successful than those that did not.

I’ve seen a lot of web designers run into trouble because they start into a project and they get stuck waiting on a client to deliver content, and it never happens. The more successful web designers tend to take a very proactive role in helping clients develop content and I think that is part of where this specialty is coming from. Many web design firms, and big businesses that produce a lot of content, have realized that not everyone is good at creating content.

“The more successful web designers tend to take a very proactive role in helping clients develop content…”

I think there is a lot of overlap between what traditional Creative Directors have done and what Content Strategists do today. It’s not just about writing copy, it’s about thinking through what the goals and objectives are considering what kinds of content will help move an audience towards those goals and objectives. Content Strategy takes a lot more than writing. It takes business sense and strategic sense and a deeper understanding of the audience and the company’s goals. It can definitely become a time consuming part of any web project.

I think that creative content strategy is an exciting area to work. Developing a brand’s voice and how it can lead a client toward their goals is a rewarding endeavour. Thanks Janine!

You can watch Janine’s course on Content Strategy on Lynda.com at
http://www.lynda.com/Web-User-Experience-tutorials/Creating-Effective-Content-Strategy-Your-Website/109764-2.html

Or visit her website at http://www.digitalfamily.com/ to learn more about her books, videos, and consulting services, as well growing collection of free tutorials on web design.

Take a look at your webpage. Does it look as good as your competitor’s webpages? Does it look dated and maybe like it was made sometime in the 1990s? There are a lot of different ways that you can make this assessment and determine when to update your website, but one of the most useful is to take a look at the current trends in web design and to see whether or not your site is incorporating any of them. Remember, not all trends are good ones, but there definitely are some great ideas out there right now.

Columns

One of the most common features you’ll see on modern webpages is a columnar layout. Most webpages these days are two- or three-column affairs. This allows the website owners to get a great deal of content on the webpage without crowding it out. If you’re still on a primitive one-column website, it’s a good idea to talk to a web designer about adding columns when you update your website. One of the reasons you may want to do this is that it actually allows you to cut down on the number of pages on your website.

Contact Info All Over

Some of the worst and most outdated websites out there have a separate contact page, which is the only place you can find contact information on the entire site. Others don’t even have a clearly indicated contact page but, instead, have tiny text on the bottom of the page that users are expected to find if they want to talk to a human being.

One really useful trend out there is putting contact information all over the site. It’ll show up in the columns, on the footer, at the end of articles and so forth. You may want to consider taking advantage of this trend when you update your website. It makes it very easy for people to take an action after reading a call to action.

Short Paragraphs

Short paragraphs are actually a pretty significant website trend these days and should be something to consider when you update your website. Over time, it’s become apparent that people prefer their information in short, easily digested paragraphs. If your content is entirely made up of long, intimidating paragraphs, consider hopping on the bandwagon and chopping it up a bit or having it rewritten altogether as you update your website.

Whenever your website looks outdated to you, it’s time to update it. Take a look at the current trends in website design and see which of them appeal to you. Chances are, quite a few of them will.

Just about 100 percent of the websites out there have a combination of content that is more or less static and content that is dynamic. For example, many websites have a blog section that is updated on a regular basis. This would be an example of a dynamic form of content. It’s always changing, it’s regularly renewed with new materials and the search engines tend to notice this. The static content on the website includes things such as the “About Us” page, the “Contact Us” page, and so forth. It is important to update static content as well and not only your dynamic content when you are update your website.

Believe it or not, it’s a good idea to update the static content once in a while. Obviously, a lot of this information isn’t going to change. There are real advantages to updating, however.

New Technology

If you take a look at most of the contact information pages on modern websites, they’ll have a map on them – usually from Google Maps or another, similar, service – along with the phone number, address and so forth. It wasn’t too long ago that most contact pages only had the name, address and phone number that applied on them. Updating these pages when you update your website to include new content that’s only recently become available is a great way to keep your site fresh and offer your visitors something at the same time.

New Format

The costs of having websites designed have actually decreased over time for many businesses. This means that some of the basic pages that just about every business has were created very quickly and very minimally to save money. Reformatting them to have a bit more style is a great way to make your site more interesting and can be easily done when you update your website. For example, if your About Us page is nothing more than a paragraph of text, you may want to consider revamping it a bit as you update your website. Add compelling content. Add keywords. There’s a lot you can do with a page that’s just been sitting there gathering digital dust for a long time.

Old Articles

If you have old articles on your site that are not part of your blog section, make sure that the information in them is still current as you update your website. If the information is outdated, you’re not only giving your visitors bad information, you may be ruining some of your search engine optimization efforts.

It’s important to keep sites updated, and that includes the static pages on your website. If you do, there are a lot of different benefits that you can be sure to reap.

Are you sick of looking at your website? When getting ready to update your website, consider these five ways to make your site a lot more interesting place to surf.

1: The Colors

Even if you have a color scheme to which your company is very attached, you may be able to update it a bit and give your site a new look. Talk to a web designer about enhancing the colors by making them brighter, sharper and so forth when you update your website. You may also want to talk to them about incorporating your color scheme into areas of the site such as borders, which can make your site more interesting to look at.

2: New Menus

There are many different types of navigation menus available now that are relatively new. The simple, underlined links of the past no longer have to constitute your main navigation. Ask about drop-down menus, popout menus and so forth. These may make your site much more interesting to look at when you update your website, as well.

3: Graphics

Consider having your logos touched up or having your graphics redesigned completely when you update your website. This is a great way to get an idea of how you would want to continue enhancing your website. Graphics are obviously among the most important parts of your website and, because of that, it’s generally well worth the money to update them now and then.

4: Text

Consider rethinking how you have your text presented on your page. Typographical changes are great ways to make your website a lot more readable. Today, there are more fonts available for the web than there ever were before and web designers know a lot more about making websites accessible by making them easy to read. You may also want to consider adding a feature that allows people to reduce or increase the size of the text on the page, depending upon their preference.

Remember to consider headings and subheadings, as well. They make content much easier to digest.

5: Layout

If you don’t want to generate new content for your website, consider simply changing the layout when you update your website. This can make your site a lot easier for people to read. For example, if you have a lot of long articles, consider adding a “continue” button at the bottom of a short excerpt. This allows people to look at a summary of a lot of different articles on a page and to go to the full article if they like it.

Any one of these small enhancements can make a website much more interesting and should be considered when you are ready to update your website.

At last week’s UX Breakfast: Service Design & Design Thinking event, I was able to sit down and speak with Craig Peters, CEO of Awasu Design and UX Evangelist. Craig leads a super talented team of strategists, designers and writers who pride themselves in finding eloquent solutions to complex problems including those in UX design. Awasu Design’s growing list of clients include HP, Wells Fargo, Ancestry.com, SocialEyes and Flurry.

1.) Hello Craig. Tell our readers a little bit about what you do.

I run Awasu Design, an agency in San Francisco. We love complex design challenges; sites, applications, strategy. Clients come to us for great designs. More and more, they’re asking for organizational help; they want their design teams to be more effective. We “design” the organization, as well.

2.) The words “experience” and “learning” have a lot in common. How did your experiences teaching help you become better at UX design?

I love this question because there are so many ways that teaching has helped me when it comes to UX design, both as a designer and also as a leader and facilitator.

As a teacher, it was my job to create an environment where my students could learn something. As much as I might have wanted to, it wouldn’t do any good if I simply gave the answers to the class. They needed to go through the process of figuring things out, make connections, and really take ownership of what they were learning. Not only that, but when I forced my ego out of the way, I realized that I didn’t really have all the answers; there was a lot of creativity, energy, and perspective in those kids that needed the right space to flourish. My job was to create the environment and facilitate the experiences for learning.

“When we push our ego aside, we’re able to realize there’s a lot of creative design thinking in everyone on the project.”

It’s not much different leading a UX design project. My job isn’t to solve all the design challenges. It’s to create the right situation for the design team to do what they do best. And, as we’re evolving as a design team – and also as an industry – it’s our job to spread that outwardly to everyone else on the project team; business partners, engineers, product managers… everyone. When we push our ego aside, we’re able to realize there’s a lot of creative design thinking in everyone on the project. Sure, we’re still experts at UX design, but we’re going to get a lot further when the entire project team is part of the creative process.

3.) Storytelling is the new buzz word these days. Why is this concept rising back to the top of UX design world?

We’re living in an age of increased interconnections that brings with it complexities like we’ve never had to deal with before. Storytelling is one of the best tools for making sense of a complex situation such as those involved in UX design.

Here’s an old example from kids TV to illustrate what I mean. In the 70s, there were these wonderful animated shorts on Saturday mornings that taught kids something. One of them, “I’m just a Bill,” showed kids how laws are made. They didn’t do it by describing different branches of government, listing how many congressional committees there are, or showing some sort of business-process diagram. Instead they made a main character – a bill (named, of course, Bill). By riding along with Bill through his journey, even a third-grader can understand how laws are made.

Today’s UX design challenges, and the organizations that are trying to tackle them, are complex. If we can get the audience – the project team – to feel like they’re identifying with a main character – a persona – then we can walk them through a complex story – a scenario.

5.) What does your team do to test out new ideas and concepts for UX design?

As a general rule, we try to get user feedback often and early. In the early stages of UX design, we test with static screens and flows. Those quickly turn into low-fidelity prototypes. Since we specialize in rich, complex interactions, we often need a more interactive prototype to really get into the experience. It’s invaluable for user testing, and it’s also a great tool for making final tweaks and adjustments to the UX design.

We also have a process/culture that helps us validate our work internally along the way, so there’s a better chance the prototype will be awesome, and only require tweaks and evolutions, not full overhauls. Here’s how we work.

1. We share ideas constantly, whether it’s showing our own sketches, whiteboarding together, reviewing wireframes internally, etc.

2. We don’t get attached to our designs–we’re always coming back to the bigger questions/high-level goals and throwing out things that aren’t working, finding better solutions, so that by the time we’re ready to show work to the client or build a prototype, we feel pretty confident that we have a solid foundation.

3. We design flows, not individual screens, so we’re always checking the design’s ability to support scenarios.

6.) Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. As we leave today and return to our projects, what can our readers do right now to become better at UX design?

There are two things that always help. First, take your current design challenge; whatever you’re working on today. Step back from the traditional notion of “designing” and ask what the big picture purpose is. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s so easy to lose sight of. Then, extend that to every meeting you have with your designers, the project team, and any business partners. At the start of the meeting, revisit the reason for this project. We sometimes call it the Eyes on the Prize page of our presentations.

The second thing is to pay more attention to how you present your work; how you tell the story of the project. Put yourselves in the shoes of your audience for every meeting. A business partner likely hasn’t been thinking about user flows and wireframes for the past two weeks, so take a moment to tell them what’s been happening since the last meeting, what’s going to happen today, and how they should participate. A few minutes at the start of the meeting is always worth it.

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After our interview, Craig told me that he’s been working on a few event presentations and workshops. Be sure to look for his name at upcoming design events! He has a lot of fascinating concepts and processes that he uses everyday with his team that are definitely worth listening too!

Follow Craig on Twitter at @craigpeters!
Follow Awasu Design on Twitter at @awasudesign!
Visit Awasu Design’s website at www.awasudesign.com!

Last month I was able to participate in the latest UX Breakfast, Service Design & Design Thinking at Cafe Laurent. If you’re not familiar with the event, the Los Angeles web design community gathers once a month to discuss many of the hottest topics buzzing around our industry including UX design. I encourage you sign up for next month’s event before it sells out! Before I get started, I want to give the event organizers a BIG shout out! Thank you Crystal Ehrlich (@cbehrlich) and Charlie “Carlos” Salazar (@CharlieSalazar) for putting on this awesome event month after month. High-fives!

In my corner, I was privileged enough to sit next to Craig Peters (@craigpeters), Hunter Ochs (@hunterochs), Yoko Nakano (@yknakano) and Charlie Salazar (@CharlieSalazar). Below, you’ll find a few of the topics we chatted about. Let’s get started!

Be sure to check out my interview with Craig Peters, CEO of Awasu Design. We discussed Service Design Thinking, storytelling and ways that you can become better at UX design tomorrow. Read Interview »

What is Service Design Thinking?

Service Design Thinking is a holistic way of visualizing a brand’s overall user experience. Though the phrase has been garnering a lot of attention in the media, our table agreed that the concept has been around for awhile and that the new moniker is merely a change in semantics. This doesn’t denote the importance of Service Design Thinking and UX design. The phrase is tangible for clients, and taking the time to see how your brand’s touch points interconnect with each other can help you identify ways to strengthen their relationships and, even better, discover new innovating ones.

For example, mapping out the user experience of a bank customer might help a UX design team visualize a connection between a bank’s mobile app and their ATMs. This might lead to a new innovative idea such as allowing customers to automatically sign in to ATMs as they pull up in their vehicles.

Want to know more? Check out these Service Design Thinking videos.

Selling Usability to your Clients

Yoko Nakano asked our table “How do you guys convey the importance of UX design and usability to your clients?” Craig Peters quickly answered, “You have to sell it!” He gave us an example where a client wasn’t 100% convinced on usability testing. His client didn’t see the importance (ahh!). Craig’s team quickly gathered a group of users and had them complete various tasks on the client’s website. They recorded the tests then compiled the videos and presented it to the client. Once the client saw that their users were having issues purchasing their product, they quickly understood the importance of usability testing and UX design. This is something you can try with your clients tomorrow!

Try www.webex.com to record your next user testing session. If budget is a concern, try Join.me and Quicktime to record your session.

What is UX design?

Hunter Ochs lead us into our next topic. He wanted to know what UX Design meant for each one of us. He went on to discuss the technology aspects of user-interface design, best-practices and UX design in terms of user workflows and patterns. These are all important areas of Service Design Thinking. We also discussed the emotive portion of UX Design, in terms of how an interface interacts with the user on an interpersonal level. A good interface should have an engaging relationship with the user. By doing so, the experience becomes comfortable and user friendly leading to a more productive user.

Check out our Los Web Design Community: Event Review on Dani Chisnell’s Deconstructing Delight: Pleasure, Flow and Meaning. She discusses the emotive side of UX Design.

Sell User Experience by Telling a Story

Storytelling may be the buzzword of the year. Craig Peters discussed how it is not only beneficial to the actual product, but to the sales pitch for UX services such as UX design as well. He went on to talk about how important a good presentation is and how’s it’s not created overnight, but is the culmination of many iterations and planning. It’s about preparation. Hunter Ochs also discussed how improv lessons can help during presentations. He said he saw dramatic improvements after a colleague signed up for an evening improv workshops.

Getting Better Client Participation Through Workshops

There can be a ton of moving pieces, decisions and sign-offs that need to be made throughout the life of a project. Craig talked about how his studio uses workshops to help get stockholders involved in the project. Are wireframes taking too long? Invite your client over to the studio to knock them out in collaborative workshop.

For more information about running productive workshops, making decisions and moving projects along. Check out Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner.

Hindsight is 20/20. Harness Hindsight Now with Heaven and Hell Technique

If you could see into the future, what would you do to help your product today? Try fore-sighting with the Heaven and Hell exercise. Have your team look gaze into the future and under “Heaven” write the best case scenarios for your project, i.e. “featured as top app in iTunes store” or “increased monthly sign-ups by 10%”. Now for each of these, have your team team write down possible reasons why they came true, like “feature on TechCrunch lead to 20,000 new sign ups” or “created a blog with a steady feed of updates.” Now do the same for Hell. This isn’t as fun, but can be the most beneficial part of the exercise. Examples might be “competition surpassed us with new features”, “new memberships plateaued” or “could not find interested investors.” Reasons could be “not enough attention and budget for research and design”, “failed to get attention of review sites” or “overlooked SEO”.

Even though these are assumptions, they can give you a place to start thinking about potential opportunities and pitfalls that might lay ahead. Try it!

Next UX Breakfast: NFC and RFIDs

Crystal and Carlos are busy getting things ready for the next UX Breakfast. UX’ers will gather to talk about NFC (Near field communication) and RFIDs (Radio-frequency identification). Potential guest speakers include Phillipe Tregon, Theresa Billy and someone from VIVOtech.

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I hope you enjoyed my synopsis of last month’s event. I think there are some good nuggets in here. I definitely encourage you to take the topics discussed and do a little more research to see what you can learn. Personally, I am pretty excited to incorporate some of Craig’s suggestions on UX design in to my future projects. Also, who knows. It might be time to sign up for an Improv class. It sounds like a fun way to sharpen up the presentation skills.

If you have an comments, suggestions, please let me know. You comment below or email me a luke@mediacontour.com. Thanks!

Even if your website is very content heavy, your graphics play a huge part in the impression that people take away from it. If your graphics are looking dated, you may well want to consider having them updated when you update your website. Even if you’re not ready for a full site redesign, simply updating your graphics can do a lot to improve the quality of your site. Here are some things that should make you consider having your graphics updated.

Pixelation

Some outdated graphics suffer from pixelation. Pixilation is usually seen in the form of rough edges around the borders where colors join or where the graphic actually starts. You may also notice it in some types of lettering.

Having a graphic designer take care of this when you update your website can make your website look much more professional. Computer technology where graphics are concerned is much more advanced than it used to be. There is absolutely no reason that your graphics should not look as clear and sharp on a computer screen as they would in print.

Outdated Trends

Lettering and graphics are both subject to trends. If your logo was designed to make use of a current trend, you may want to consider having it redesigned when you are ready to update your website. If that trend has passed, it simply makes your graphics look dated. There are examples of dated graphics, however, that look very current. Coca-Cola, for instance, uses a script in their graphics that is not commonly seen in new graphics. For most modern companies, however, having your lettering and your graphics redesigned to look more modern is generally a good idea when you update your website. Provided it’s not too drastic, it shouldn’t impact your branding.

Relaunch

If you happen to be relaunching your website, it’s a great time to have your graphics redesigned. People will expect it, in fact. Aside from adding new functionalities and a new look, adding little graphical enhancements here and there can make your website look very modern and very advanced. A good graphic designer will know how to make this happen for you.

Graphics are among the most cost-effective elements of your website that you can have enhanced when you update your website. Whether you want a professional web designer to update your graphics alone or to overhaul your entire site, it’s always worth considering whether or not the graphics your site uses are contributing to an outdated look for your site on the whole. If they are, it might be time to make a change that gives your site a whole new look.

Multimedia content delivery is a very big consideration for any website. If you’re streaming or offering multimedia content from your own server, you’re likely utilizing a great deal of bandwidth to do it. There are improved ways of delivering content compared to what was available in the past. Having a professional web designer take a look at this and see if there are improvements that could be made could be very beneficial for you when you update your website.

Formats

If you started offering video or audio on your site a long time ago, there’s a good chance that you’re using a format that may not be optimal. When formats for streaming improve, it’s generally an improvement in compression. If you are using very large files to deliver content, you may be consuming unnecessary bandwidth for no appreciable benefit. Having a web design expert take a look when you update your website at how you are delivering content in terms of format may reveal that you have a lot of options available for reducing bandwidth without compromising quality.

Off-Site

If you have content on your website that is available from another website that allows you to embed, you may want to switch to that model of delivery when you update your website. A good example of this would involve the site YouTube. If you have a promotional video available on the YouTube site, there’s no sense in having it delivered directly from your own servers. Simply switching this content to an embedded form when you update your website may allow you to save on bandwidth and provide no form of diminishment in service to the people who visit your site.

Layout

Web designers can use the newest layout techniques to make sure that your multimedia content is presented in the most attractive way possible when you update your website. Videos can be set up so that users can enlarge them to a full-screen size, watch them in a popout window or take advantage of other options. Pages can be arranged so that thumbnails of videos are presented alongside written content, giving people the option to watch or read, depending upon their preference.

If you need to deliver multimedia content off of your website, there are plenty of ways that you can increase the efficiency of it and make sure that your visitors are having the best experience possible. This starts with talking to your web designer when you are ready to update your website. Web designers deal with multimedia sites all the time and will know the best way for you to set yours up for your visitors.

Not everybody who approaches a website redesign project has a lot of money to spend on it. Fortunately, there are ways that you can update your website and make it a lot more modern and attractive without spending a great deal of money. Here are some strategies to help you do that.

Get a Consultation

The first thing you want to do when you update your website is get a web designer to consult with you about what really needs to be done with your website. They’ll be able to identify things such as technical shortcomings, elements of the website that might be out of compliance with World Wide Web Consortium standards, navigation menus that are broken and so forth. It might not cost that much for you to get all of these items fixed. If you want to proceed with a more extensive redesign when you update your website, you will at least be starting from a good point.

Replace Your Graphics

If you have old and outdated graphics on your website, you generally don’t need to get the entire site updated to have those graphics updated. Talk to a web design firm and ask if they can update your graphics for you without updating the entire site. This is a small but meaningful improvement that might go a long way toward making your site look great without you having to spend a lot of money to do it.

Change the Layout

Changing the layout of a website is also inexpensive, in many cases. Talk to a web designer about whether or not they could port your content to a new layout without it costing you a great deal of money when you update your website. They may have a template set up already that could be used to give you better looking content pages and so forth.

Have a Long Term Plan

Instead of thinking of a site redesign as a one-time project, think of it as something that you’ll do over the long-term. This way, you can divide up the costs of the site and determine what needs to be done first, what needs to be done second and so forth. This makes the price a lot less intimidating when you update your website, even if you need a complete overhaul.

You might be surprised at how much a web designer can do without having to redesign your site from the ground up. In fact, if you have a good site to start with, a web designer might be able to give it a few improvements here and there that go a long way without costing a lot of money.

Ideally, your website will grow and thrive once you get it online. One of the difficulties associated with this type of growth, however, is the fact that a website that grows very quickly may end up becoming very crowded and hard to navigate. This necessitates an update in layout, which is something web designers can help you with when you update your website.

Old Sites

Older websites used to have very simple layouts. In fact, one-column websites were relatively common. These are fine if you have a very simple promotional website with a little bit of content on it; a few pictures and so forth. When you start adding content, however, it becomes increasingly difficult for people to find their way around your site.

Even if they find the page where a piece of content that they want to read is printed, the user may have to scroll a lot to actually locate the article and that can make them go away in frustration.

Updating the layout on old sites oftentimes means updating the scheme under which the content is arranged. If you have a professional web designer take a look at your site, they may be able to identify ways in which they can improve the layout when you update your website so that it is easier for people to find specific content. This may include adding different types of headings for articles, adding or removing columns and so forth as you update your website.

Organization

A web designer may well want to re-organize your content, as well. Over time, if you’ve added a lot of content to your site without considering where that content should go first, you may find that your content ends up in a serious state of disarray. Re-organizing the content and redoing the navigation menus when you update your website can solve this problem. It’s definitely worth it if you have a lot of good content that you want people to read.

Browsing 

There are different ways that people can browse websites these days. They can use tabs, carousels, image sliders, regular navigation menus and so forth. A web designer can likely find ways to feature a great deal of content on a page without making it so over-the-top that you can’t find anything.

If your website is confusing to you, it’s probably even more confusing to visitors. If you want your website to be as accessible as possible, consider having a web designer take a look at it and see what they could do as far as rearranging your content and improving your navigation goes when you update your website.

One of the most important aspects of your website is the color scheme that you use. Sometimes, a site that looks dated and stale may benefit from a new color scheme. Here are some things to consider if you want to update your color scheme to breathe some fresh life into your old site when you update your website.

 What Colors Mean

People tend to interpret colors in particular ways. For example, red is commonly associated with power. The same is true of black. Blue tends to be associated with trust and green tends to make people feel relaxed. You’ll want to learn a little bit about the psychology of color before you decide upon a new color scheme when you update your website.

Remember that a color scheme doesn’t have to involve many different colors. For example, many banking and other financial sites utilize blue color schemes because of the trust that the color tends to engender in people. You could utilize several different shades of blue rather than trying to find a good two- or three-color theme for your website.

Vibrancy

If you had your website designed long ago, there’s a good chance that the graphic designers who did it, even if they were very good, did not have access to the same types of tools that today’s web designers and graphic designers have. Today, web designers can utilize sophisticated tools to create very vibrant color schemes and this can truly revitalize the look when you update your website. They can take a dull version of your company’s color scheme, for instance, and update it so that it is every bit as vibrant as it appears on your printed materials.

The quality of people’s monitors has increased tremendously over the years, as well, and that means that slight variations in color are easier to detect. One very smart way to update the color scheme when you update your website is to have a professional graphic designer take a look at it and look for discrepancies in color when those colors should be exactly the same.

Trends

Color is definitely something that is subject to trends in design. Sometimes, dull and even distressed color schemes are very popular and, at other times, vibrant and dynamic color schemes are popular. If your website was designed 10 or 15 years ago, you may very well want to have a graphic designer take a look at it when you update your website and see if updating the use of color could give it a more modern look. Changing the color here and there can make a huge difference in the look of any website.

One of the truly innovative things you can do to update your website is to add features that allow you to automatically update your social media feeds. This eliminates the need for the people who handle your Internet marketing to update your social media feeds individually after making an update to your website.

The Concept

Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and other social media giants do have tools that work with them and that allow you to update them regularly. In fact, there are tools available that you can incorporate when you update your website that allow you to update your social media sites on a schedule. Your Internet marketing people, using these tools, could make several updates for these feeds and schedule them to deploy automatically.

This can save a great deal of time and money and increase the return on investment you get from your website and is a great addition when you update your website. It also allows you to do something very important, given the fact that many social media sites are coming up with various payment schemes for companies that use them for largely advertising purposes.

Redirect the Traffic 

The value of having a Facebook profile and a Twitter account for a business has been discussed endlessly in many different media outlets. This tends to underrate the value of actually having a real website. As was said previously, many social media outlets are finding ways to charge business customers for the advertising that they do that was formerly free. Your website is something that you control and, of course, you don’t have to pay for advertising on your own website.

Integrating your website updates with your social media feeds provides you with a way to direct traffic to your website from those social media sites.  Keep this in mind as you update your website. Provided you have a good website, you may be able to retain some of those people and have them start visiting your site preferentially, rather than looking for your Facebook profile or other social media presence.

Add or Not? 

There’s really no reason not to update your website with these tools. They’re far too easy to use and far too economical to pass up. They also allow you to, perhaps ironically, enjoy a bit of freedom from being completely dependent on using social networks. Because you can handle this directly from your website, you don’t have to expend the extra time involved in going through all of the different interfaces, making updates and, on top of all of that, trying to keep the updates consistent across many different social media networks.

If you’re not a web developer or a network technician, it can be extremely difficult to figure out what might be causing problems that you’re having with your site. When you do figure out what the problem likely is, you’re probably going to end up calling tech support, but it helps to know which tech support you should call. Here are some common website issues and some of the common culprits that cause them.

1: Slow Loading

Determining whether common website issues such as slow loading are due to issues with your server or your page is sometimes difficult to determine. Generally speaking, if your page loads very slowly the first time you try and every subsequent time, it’s probably a design issue. If your page normally loads very quickly but suddenly slows down to a snail’s pace, the server may be having trouble. There is a third potential cause, as well: your Internet connection. Follow the procedure for resetting your Internet connection to eliminate this possibility or try to visit other websites to see if you have the same problem before you start looking for problems with your page or your server.

2: Incorrect Display

Some website designs are what are called responsive designs. Responsive designs automatically reformat themselves to accommodate different types of screens. If your website is displaying oddly in a mobile device or on your regular desktop computer, you may be experiencing one of the very common website issues. Have your developers check it out to make certain that it works correctly in any devices that they have and, if they have a problem, too, they can start troubleshooting it right away.

3: Page Not Found and Other Errors

Internet errors, such as the infamous 404 error, can be difficult to troubleshoot and can be one of the most frustrating of the common website issues. You may actually have a missing page within the directories for your site or you may simply be having an issue with your server. Determining which is the case is usually a matter of seeing how long it lasts. Try refreshing the page that shows up as missing or try visiting the site after a few minutes. If the page still isn’t there, contact your web host and, if that doesn’t give you the results you need, contact your designer to see if there’s a page missing in your directories.

4: Security Issues

These are some of the most serious issues you can have with your website. If you have a customer complaint regarding somebody getting access to their account in some nefarious way, contact your server administrators immediately. Most of the time, common website issues are caused by server problems. There are times, however, where they are design problems and where you have to consult with your web designer to get the issue resolved.

The idea that everything old becomes new again is, appropriately enough, nothing new. Design aesthetics that were popular in the past have become very popular with web design. The field of web design is relatively young compared to other forms of graphic design and, because of that, web design conventions have not had long to mature. Some of the most interesting design trends of the past are providing new ways for graphic designers to envision a site and to create something truly remarkable for their clients and can be used as a theme when you update your website.

Layers and Shadows

If you look at some of the best graphic design from the past, you’ll see that it incorporates depth a great deal. Different elements of the image will be layered on top of one another and shadow will be used to offer an illusion that there’s genuine depth to the image. Using today’s graphic design technology and the body of skills that have been developed since the Internet became important to commerce graphic designers who can create these types of effects on a computer screen. Keep this in mind when working with your designer to update your website.

Realism

One of the truly lacking elements in early graphic design for the Internet was that things tended to look cartoonish and not at all real. Today, between very sophisticated displays and powerful graphic design tools, graphic designers can create images that are very real; so real looking that it looks like you could pluck them right off of the screen.

Creating the illusion of texture, such as you would see on paper and canvas or other materials is well within the range of most graphic designers these days. You can give your site a classy and antique look when you update your website by giving things an appearance that is quite simply less computerized looking.

Ornate Lettering

There are literally hundreds of fonts available to any graphic designer, but they can also get creative and develop specific and very ornate lettering for logos. This can give your logo a touch of class and a timeless quality that really makes it stand out when you update your website.

When you discuss incorporating retro elements into your site design as you update your website, be sure you ask your graphic designer how much they believe to be enough. It is possible to go overboard with this and end up with a very cluttered looking site. Then again, cluttered was once an aesthetic used in a great deal of graphic design and, perhaps, it would work for your site.

Minimalism is a popular aesthetic for business sites. Done properly, it can be quite effective. For some businesses, it’s a natural choice because it tends to create a very refined and reserved look. If you’re considering a minimalistic aesthetic when you update your website, here are some pros and cons of this very popular design trend.

Pros

Minimalism as an aesthetic for web design presents the fewest possible distractions to your visitors.  Consider this as you update your website.  They’re generally presented with the text that you find important for them to read, the navigation menu and, perhaps, one or two images and your logo. Negative space tends to figure very prominently in the minimalistic aesthetic and many of the best minimalistic sites have more blank space than they do occupied space.

The big advantage in this particular style of design is the fact that it gives the image of a business that is very serious. There is nothing frivolous to distract people and there is nothing overly trendy about the site. The effect, in the end, is somewhat like the classic banker’s business card. A simple font, the information you need and nothing else. This simple sort of aesthetic is excellent for conveying information when you update your website.

Minimalistic sites, because they are not overcrowded with many different elements, also tend to load very quickly. Particularly for tech businesses, this is a real advantage. When your site instantly pops up on the screen in all its glory, it does give an image of efficiency and technical ability.

Of course, minimalistic websites are also very easy to populate with content. Because you’ll have very little space to fill up, you can concentrate on making very high quality content that is brief, to the point and easy to read. These are just a few of the pros of going with a minimalistic design when you update your website.

Cons

Despite all of their advantages, sites that have minimalistic aesthetics can also be quite dull. A white background with a logo and some text on it doesn’t really stand out much compared to other sites on the Internet. In fact, if it isn’t done properly, minimalistic aesthetics can make a site look underdeveloped or cheap. The key to avoiding this is working with a designer who knows the difference between doing as little as possible and using as little as possible to convey a great deal of important information when you update your website.

As your site grows and becomes more complex, a minimalistic design may become something of a hindrance. Designs that are more complex allow you to fit more information on a page. If you start adding features to your page, you may find that the minimalistic framework you started out with is inadequate when you want to put more information or features up to keep your visitors interested.

One other thing that you may want to consider when you update your website is that minimalism for business sites is a very popular trend at the moment. If you look at websites designed in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you’ll find that many of them look dated. If they haven’t been updated, they’ll still be representing trends that may have gone out of style a long time ago. For example, using images for navigation was once a very popular trend. Today, text menus are the norm and websites that have images that are used for navigating the site tend to look a bit old.

Talk to your web designer about whether or not minimalism might work as an aesthetic for you when you update your website. In some cases, whether or not it’s trendy won’t even matter. If it’s the right way to go for your website, something that’s trendy can easily become timeless and something that simple can be very powerful.

The positioning of your banners and your logos should tell you a lot about how important they are to your site overall. They are, of course, positioned right on the top of your site, in most cases, meaning that they make the first impression that visitors get. If you have a banner or logo that is far past its prime in terms of design and looks, you may want to consider redesigning it when you update your website as a major part of any web redesign plans you have in mind.

Check the Colors

If your logo or your banner was designed a long time ago, it may well reflect more primitive graphic design. One of the areas in which graphic design has improved a great deal is in color. Today’s graphic designers can incorporate gradients and other sophisticated effects to make a truly eye-catching design. In addition to making your design more eye-catching when you update your website, selecting the right colors can prevent your design from looking cheap. Blocky designs with unsophisticated color selections do not catch people’s eyes.

Your Fonts

Perhaps 20-point Papyrus font looked good when you selected it, but it probably looks outdated right now. Consider revamping your logo with a new font selection when you update your website.

There is a caveat here. For some businesses, your font selection is an important part of your branding. Even though this may be the case, a good graphic designer may be able to recommend some slight changes to your font selection that could have a big impact on how your logo looks overall.

Your graphic designer may also recommend some interesting visual effects, such as increasing the size of one letter but not of the others. Typography is a big part of good graphic design and, provided you have a good graphic designer working with you, you should be able to find a very attractive solution to any lacking elements in your logo’s fonts when you update your website.

Fast Loading

If your site suffers from a lack of professional design considerations, your logo might actually be bloated and cause people’s computers to load it more slowly. A graphic designer may be able to improve the quality of your logo and compact it in terms of the size it takes up when you update your website. This may not be a very big consideration for a site that doesn’t get a lot of traffic but, if you do get a lot of traffic, reducing your bandwidth requirements in any way – even reducing the size of graphics slightly – can make a big difference in how much money it costs to run your site.

Internet users are easily distracted. The Internet, when it works the way it should, provides one of the best ways for people to get information and to find related information by simply clicking on a link. This is a great set up for research and learning, but it’s not always the best set up for commerce sites. If you need to retain visitors on your site, you have to know when you should not encourage them to leave by presenting them with a rather interesting link. Here are some great linking strategies for when you update your website.

SEO and Linking

Anyone who has studied search engine optimization knows that adding links from your site to useful resources tends to make your site appear more worthwhile in the eyes of the search engines. The trick is not to overdo this when you update your website. You want the benefits you get from those links for search engine optimization, but you don’t want to create a situation where most of your visitors show up on your page, read a few paragraphs and then immediately go elsewhere because one of your links encourages them to do so.

You’ll definitely want links off of your site to other sites that have genuinely useful and related information, but you need to do it in a way that retains visitors, which is something of a challenge when you update your website.

In the Middle of Articles

It’s essentially the convention at this point to denote when you’re referencing a site by linking to that site in the text. For example, you might have a sentence that reads “Be sure you put chocks behind your tires to stabilize your vehicle when it is up on the ramps.” If you happened to be linking to a site that sold vehicle ramps, it would be intelligent to link to a site where the reader can buy those ramps, encouraging them to leave the site but making a sale and the process. Putting a link to the word “chocks”, however, that simply led to an informational site about those devices might end up sending the visitor off to that site, never to return to your own.

If you’re going to put a link in the middle of an article, be sure it is advantageous to you in some way when you update your website. If you’ve ever lost yourself in a Wikipedia article and ended up hopping through several related articles because you clicked on a link in the first article, you’ll know exactly the effect that putting an interesting link in the middle of a story can have.

Only Once

You don’t have to link to a site you use as a reference more than once in an article. In the above example, for instance, you wouldn’t need to link to every instance of the word “ramps”. Doing it once is sufficient and it encourages people to keep reading your article by not presenting them with constant distractions.  Keep this in mind when you update your website.

Linking too many times from your site can also have negative impacts on your search engine optimization efforts. If you’re not certain how much linking is good for your site, talk to your web designer and get their opinion on the matter when you update your website.

Check Your References

If you’re going to link to an off-site destination to offer more information about a topic that you’re covering on your blog or other site, make sure you thoroughly inspect that site before you make the link. You’ll want to look out for obvious problems, such as the site you’re linking to linking directly to a competitor’s site. You’ll also want to make certain that you read the entire article that you’re linking to be certain that you’re actually sending someone to a good information source.

Linking is a great strategy for making your site more interesting and more useful, make certain that you do it right when you update your website.

When you are ready to update your website, there is a temptation to update every single aspect of that site. One of the things, however, that tends to get overlooked is the font selection on your site. Most of the time, font selection is rather easy. If you have a very content heavy site, however, you may want to consider this as a way to give your website a new look.

Consistency

Different aesthetic effects can be achieved by combining many different fonts onto the same website as opposed to having one font that serves for all of the text when you update your website. Generally speaking, you will at least see variations in font selection where graphics are concerned. This is not always the case, however.

Over the years, the look of fonts used in graphic design has become cleaner. There  has also been a trend toward utilizing the same font in the majority of the content on the site or, for that matter, in a print advertisement. This consistency is held by many designers to make it easier for the reader to focus on the content that’s being delivered rather than focusing on the differences between the fonts.

You’ll want to speak with your designer as to whether the aesthetics of a very diverse selection of fonts or the selection of a single font would suit your site better when you update your website.

Readability

Readability is where font selection really comes into play. Generally speaking, where content is concerned, it’s better to stick with very simple fonts when you update your website. Sans serif fonts are generally the best selections of all. These are fonts such as Arial and Helvetica that don’t have any ornamentation on them that makes it difficult for people to read on a screen. While the venerable Times New Roman font is very attractive on printed materials, it is difficult for some people to read because of the more ornamented letters.

Font selection is actually one of the things that you will want to discuss with your designers when you are ready to update your website. If you’re looking for a more modern look, switching to a more streamlined, straightforward font may accomplish that for you. If you want something very ornate and fancy, using a font that has a lot of ornamentation on it may give your site an entirely new look. This decision may not seem to be all that consequential but, when you see the same site with different fonts used on it, you’ll quickly see how much of a difference it makes.

Because just about everybody is on a broadband Internet connection these days, site designers have become bolder about including sizable elements in websites. These include videos, complex animations, very large images and complex page structures. Unfortunately, for some users, these elements do slow down their computers quite a bit and make websites load more slowly. Given a choice between a fast loading website and your slow loading website, most visitors are going to choose the fast site. Here are some ways to speed yours up when you update your website.

Check the Code

Have a web developer look at the code that underpins your website. This is particularly useful if your website has been online for a long time and has had many alterations made to it or if your website was worked on by several different designers over the course of its lifespan. A designer may be able to go through and find code errors that will cause the site to load more slowly or that will cause certain elements not to function correctly.

Use Images Wisely

Before you start plastering images into every available spot on your site, make sure you’re doing it for a reason when you update your website. Adding images for visual appeal can be very effective, provided you do it intelligently. The image should add something to the user’s experience. If you’re putting too many images up, you’re likely slowing down the speed at which your website loads and you’re merely creating distractions for your visitors rather than giving them something particularly useful.

Clean Up Your Navigation

Navigation does not speed up the speed with which your site loads, but it certainly makes it much easier to use and makes it quicker and easier for your visitors to find their way around. It’s not a bad idea to review your site’s navigation structure, to have it changed where it is outdated and to eliminate pages that no longer serve a useful purpose when you update your website. Part of maintaining a site is taking out what doesn’t work anymore, as much as is adding elements that make it better.

Revisit Flashy Features

If you have a lot of animations or other elements on your site, reassess them when you update your website to make sure that they are worth the space they take up on your page. Some sites will benefit greatly from animation and other enhancements. For example, if you ran a news site, having a feature that automatically ran a slideshow of images that go with your most important stories would be useful. If you ran a used car lot, pictures of your newest items for sale might be useful in a similar configuration. If you run a site that has to do with literary reviews, however, animation may not be particularly useful and may just slow your site down. The investment you would put into having animation redesigned could be put into a different design element when you update your website that would be much better for your readership.

New Technologies

HTML5 and CSS3 are the latest, greatest things in the web design world. They include advances that allow you to make sites faster because of how they load animations, control layouts and other features. Talk to your web developer about updating the technology that underpins your site. Sometimes, some of the things you may have wanted that weren’t available when you had your site designed initially will prove to be available when you are ready to update your website because of advances in technology. Likewise, some of the elements on your site that are slow and clunky may be able to be re-created in a way that makes them leaner and faster loading.

Redesigning a site can be as exciting as designing a site for the first time. It can be even more so, in some cases, so be sure to talk to your designer about your options when you update your website.

Incorporating galleries into websites is certainly nothing new. When you are ready to update your website, however, realize that there are far more options than were available for galleries even a few years ago. Some of these options have to do with technology and some of these options simply have to do with the evolving aesthetics of website design. 

Display

There are quite a few different options for how you can display your images in a gallery when you update your website. For instance, instead of going with page after page of thumbnails, you can utilize a design that creates one page that infinitely scrolls and presents more images as the user progresses downward to the bottom of the page.

You can also utilize displays that allow people to look at thumbnails, see an enlargement of that thumbnail on the same page and then click on the enlargement to see a full-size image displayed on their screens. This does more than provide an interesting look. It provides a way for people to look at an image in a slightly enlarged size to see if they are interested in it enough to bother clicking on it to see it in its full size.

Tech

Light boxes are among the very popular features on galleries these days. They allow you, among other things, to create a selection of images that you can review after you have reviewed the total number of images in a gallery. They oftentimes also provide a more attractive way to view an image so that the gallery itself is less distracting.

One of the elements that you’ll want to take into consideration when you update your website and are redesigning a gallery is speed of loading. Some gallery effects and some add-ons that you can utilize on gallery pages that will slow down the load speed for your page somewhat. If you have a lot of visitors  with slower computers, you may want to avoid these when you update your website.

With the right display, your images will look more attractive, they will be easier to decipher when they are thumbnail sized and it will be easier for your visitors to browse through your collection of images to look at your products or to see your photography. Looking at any gallery sections on your page is among the first things you should do when you start working with a graphic designer to update your website.

If you know that you need a website designed for you but have no idea what it should look like or what it should do, don’t think that means that you’re not ready to talk to a designer about actually having the site started. If you’re at a loss as to where to even begin, here are some questions you can ask your designer that will allow them to spark your imagination and to get you going when you are ready to update your website.

 1: What Are the Trends in My Industry?

Website designers are constantly learning new and updated tools that allow them to design great sites. Part of this learning process usually involves looking at some of the more successful sites on the web and seeing what they did with that technology that’s really impressive. Sometimes, the way a skilled designer will use a technology is so clever that it becomes a trend. Ask your website designer if there are any trends in your industry that you may want to incorporate when you update your website.

A good site designer will be able to let you know what’s really working for sites in your industry and how you might incorporate that technology as you update your website without blatantly ripping anyone off.

 2: What Technologies Do You Use?

Some website designers plateau in terms of their skills and technical knowledge relatively quickly. You need to make certain that the website designer you’re working with is always updating their knowledge and utilizing new tools when they provide a better way to do something than the tools of the past when they are helping you update your website. Right now, HTML5 and CSS3 are innovating the web design industry in very meaningful ways.

When you’re talking to a web designer or a web design shop, make sure they know all of the latest technologies and that they at least have access to people who know specific technologies that some websites need to use when you update your website. For example, if you were opening up an eCommerce site, you would want to be working with a web design firm that had programmers who work in languages such as PHP, or another language that provides the same types of functionality, that eCommerce sites need to do business.

 3: Maintenance

Be sure you ask your website designer if they have any programs you can sign up for that allow you an easy way to get maintenance done on your site. Websites are enormously complicated and, sometimes, you’ll find that some element of yours needs to be replaced or rewritten or that one of the technologies you’ve used has become outdated and the site needs to be updated because of that. Most good website designers rely on repeat clients quite a bit and, because of that, most of them will be more than happy to come to some sort of arrangement for maintenance on your site.

Another important thing to keep in mind when you update your website and about site maintenance is that you need to make certain that your web designers design your site up to web authoring standards. If everything is done according to the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium, another designer should be able to move in and make changes to your site if your old designer is no longer available. If the designer you’re using isn’t one who adheres to standards, other designers may have a very difficult time figuring out their code or may spend a great deal of time going through that code and fixing errors.

These three questions can give you a rather complete picture of how working with the website designer will go when you update your website. Essentially, you’ll be asking them what kinds of features they believe would work for your site, how they would go about making those features for you and what they could do for you in terms of maintaining the site they create. All of this is vital information when you are ready to update your website.

Of all the innovations that have come into the web design world in recent years, columnar designs are among the most compelling. This is a great technique to use when you update your website. These designs allow a great deal of information to be placed on a page in a very logical way. If you’re not clear on exactly what defines these designs, it’s basically dividing the page up vertically so that each of the different vertical sections can hold different information and keep it separate from the other information on the page. It’s very similar to how newspapers are laid out.

Using Columns

The great thing about columns is that they tend to organize themselves in the perception of your visitors. For example, if you have a three-column design, people will tend to naturally gravitate towards the middle column and assume that the most important content must be right there. This gives you a powerful way to place your content so that people notice it right away when you update your website. If something really needs to be seen, put it in the middle. If it’s something that is imperative, put it in its own section above the three columns so that people reflexively know that the importance of whatever is located in that area of the screen outweighs that of whatever is in the columns below.

Your web designer can use columns in creative ways to make it easier for people to find their way around your site when you update your website. For example, most people understand that navigation will generally be found on the left side or top of a website. Putting your navigation elements in the left side column can make it easy for people to understand where they need to go if they want to switch pages.

In some designs, the right column will be used for less important content or content that is purely functional and not informational. For example, many people choose to put their social networking icons and other search engine optimization content in the right column.  Keep these in mind when you update your website.

If you have a great deal of information that you need to get on your pages, talk to your designer about utilizing columns for that purpose when you update your website. They may have some very good insights into how you can use this layout tool to your advantage and make sure that, when you do use it, you’re getting the maximum benefit. There are plenty of different layout options out there but, because they are so well understood, layouts that incorporate multiple columns are very sensible options for many projects.

Sometimes, the Internet can seem a little bit square. Not square in the sense that it doesn’t know how to have fun, but square in the sense that just about every element you see on any page involves a right angle at some point. Most menus are nothing more than rectangular shapes that span the top portion of the screen. Banner advertisements and most graphics have square borders. If you’re looking to update your website, you may want to consider adding a bit of variety where shape is concerned.

Circles

Circles provide among the best choices for innovative ways to present content on the web. Pictures can be made into circular thumbnails that create an element of visual interest and that will make some users more likely to click on them simply because those graphics catch their eyes. Company logos and other important logos can be formatted in circular or other shapes to make them more interesting.

Adding circular shapes when you update your website can make it stand out a bit from others. For example, even using circular buttons for calls to action and other purposes can draw people’s eyes to them simply because they look a bit different.

Other Shapes

Graphic designers have tremendous capability where designing websites is concerned these days. Because the Internet has been around for long enough to have developed its own conventions, however, this tremendous capacity that developers have is sometimes underutilized. People tend to gravitate to the same layouts, the same menu structures and the same graphic layouts more than not.

If you’re working with a good graphic designer and a good web developer, they can certainly find ways to incorporate shapes other than circles or squares into your design when you update your website. For example, triangles are dramatic shapes that also, because of the fact that they are shaped like arrows, tend to draw people’s attention very easily.

Discuss shape with your graphic designer when you are ready to update your website. Ask them how they could use shape as a way to make your site more interesting. Remember that the fact that most websites are designed with a lot of right angles is something that was decided for you without your input. It’s just a trend. A good website designer can help you to break trends in constructive ways when you update your website that offer a more interesting experience for your visitors and that provide no compromises in the functionality of your website because of the innovative design.

If you depend upon the Internet for business purposes, there’s a good chance that you already have a mobile device. Mobile device usage has skyrocketed as the devices themselves have become more powerful, more flexible and people have begun to use them for the types of tasks that they used to perform only on their desktop computers. When you’re planning to update your website, you want to make certain that you avoid some of the common pitfalls that make mobile sites very frustrating for users.

Size

Mobile devices come with screens in many different sizes, but human beings, for the most part, are similar in size from one to the next. This means that just about everybody’s fingers take up a certain amount of room on their mobile device’s screens when they try to navigate a webpage. Generally speaking, any navigation link on your site should be between 30 and 40 pixels in size.  Keep this in mind when you update your website.

Small navigation links – or other types of links – are intensely frustrating for mobile users. If you haven’t experienced this frustration for yourself, open the normal version of a website on your mobile device and try to tap on a link with your finger. You’ll find that, not only will you tend to hit the wrong link, you’ll have a hard time figuring out exactly where your finger actually presses onto the screen. When you update your website, adding navigation elements that are adequately sized can make your site much easier for your users to navigate and will encourage them to explore your site further.

No Regular Option

The sites designed for mobile devices are typically streamlined versions of a regular website. Sometimes, your users will prefer to access your regular website over your mobile website. Be sure you give them an option to do so on your site.

While most smartphones will have very small screens on them that make the mobile versions of websites much more useful than the full-sized versions, some devices – such as the iPad – have screens that are large enough to allow people to choose between the mobile version or regular version of a website. Not having that choice can be frustrating, particularly if you need to access something that is more easily available on the regular version of the site.

Big Pictures

One of the things you might want to discuss with your web designer when you update your website and you’re having your mobile site crafted is reducing the sizes of some of the images that are displayed on your site. If a mobile device user has a small screen and you have very large images, you can create a situation where they cannot see the entire image and, to make it worse, where they cannot manipulate the image enough to get to the button that closes it out so that they can return to your site.

This holds true for gallery features, as well. When you are ready to update your website and have a mobile site constructed, be sure that any of the enhancements are designed to be easy to use on mobile devices so that you do not frustrate your users.

Consulting Designers

A good website designer will be able to give you quite a few different options in terms of mobile site design when you update your website. Mobile devices are likely to become increasingly important in the future. Already, people are using mobile devices to go Internet shopping, pay bills and take care of other tasks. If you have specific needs out of your site – such as making it easy for visitors to fill out forms, make purchases and so forth – be sure to talk to your designer about how you go about accomplishing those goals when you update your website without creating a site that isn’t as friendly as it should be to mobile users.

If you remember the days of newspapers, you’ll remember that what got you to read them wasn’t actually the news, it was the headlines. Writing headlines is equally important in the world of search engine optimization. If you understand how to write headlines, you’ll do a lot better at getting the maximum value out of your search engine optimization content when you update your website. Because we’re talking about blogs and not newspapers, however, headlines are referred to as titles. They do serve the same function as headlines, however.

Match Your Content

One of the worst possible things you can do for search engine optimization is write titles that do not match the content that follows them. In order to give your visitors the greatest value out of your website, they should be able to understand that any title on your site does relate directly to the content that follows. The advantage in doing this is not only for your visitors. Making sure your content matches your titles gives you a reason to use your keywords in your title, which is vital for search engine optimization and is an important tool when you update your website.

Pictures

The most engaging news stories almost always have a picture with them that illustrates what’s being described. You’ll want to do this for your blog entries, as well. The more closely that your image matches your title the better it will be for your visitors and for search engine optimization. Make certain that your images have their alt tags filled out so that the keywords can be used in these, as well. Robert Caruso of BundlePost.com told us, “My best advice for making your blog articles SEO friendly is ensure your title matches your content. Always include a picture and be sure that it also matches the title of the post and the content within the article. This has worked very effectively for us.”

Word Choice

Use action words in your titles when you update your website. For example, if you had the option of using a title such as “This Computer Tool Makes Things Easier” or “Computer Tool Simplifies Workflow Process”, you would want to go with the second. It utilizes almost the same keywords but it’s more specific in terms of what the tool actually does. Specificity and words that convey action are very good ways to motivate people to actually read your content.

Don’t Write them First

Write your titles after you’ve written the content when you update your website. Quite often, you’ll find that the original title you had in mind doesn’t really fit with the text that you ended up with. It’s easier to change a title to match a blog entry than it is to change the entire blog entry to match a title.

If you want some assistance writing titles, you may want to check out the tools ScribeSEO and SEOPressor.

Disorganization

Sometimes, people will get so focused on the content of their site that they’ll forget that it needs to be organized in a logical way. Make certain you put some thought into how you’re going to organize your site, particularly if it is a large site. The more information you have, the more imperative it is that people are able to navigate their way through it without getting confused, becoming frustrated and simply giving up.

When you update your website, it’s a good idea to have a plan mapped out for your pages. You can do this with your designer or you can do it on your own. One good way to do it is simply to use a flowchart format to indicate how each of the pages is linked to one another and the position that each of them occupies in the hierarchy of your site.

Font Soup

Be careful with your font selections. In addition to making sure that you pick fonts that are easy for people to read or that reflect your business appropriately, make sure you do have consistency within your content. Using a variety of different fonts in graphic design can be great for creating a unique image but, when people are reading, switching between different fonts tends to distract from the content that they’re trying to take in.

For maximum readability, choose a sans serif font that displays correctly in any modern browser.

Too Much

Website designers can put together enormously complicated sites these days. Using columns, tabbed sections and other tools, they can get a great deal of information on a page or, if it doesn’t fit, make it accessible from that page without actually having to navigate off it. Don’t overdo this when you update your website.

People like to read information in small, easy to understand chunks. If you start filling up your pages with so much information that it only causes confusion, you can be almost certain that people are going to avoid reading anything on your page, much less trying to take all of that in. Make sure that your information is placed on your page in a logical way that allows people to see exactly what your point is and why it matters to them.

Thanks for reading, and we hope that when you update your website, you make sure to avoid these 3 common website design mistakes.

The word of the night was meaning. On August 23, Jod Kaftan from BLITZ Agency talked to the Los Angeles web design community at large about how to give meaning to a user experience. “The device should not prescribe what the experience should be,” Kaftan said. Throughout the night he discussed four main points which all related to the idea that interaction design should have meaning when implemented onto a device. “Really what this exploration is about is thinking of the device last,” he said.

“For me, meaning in terms of interaction design is about resonance,” Kaftan said, “meaning should serve as a beacon for interaction designers to push us into new, interaction paradigms.” Next he mentioned that he has only scratched the surface with contemplating what meaning is and how it relates to design. The LA web design community was then taken through the four dynamics of what connects interaction design to meaning.

MEANING MAKES THE DEVICE
To begin, Jod Kaftan presented the definitions of Device and Purpose. A device exists to serve a particular need or purpose. “The thing is, we’re not always conscious of our needs,” Kaftan explained, “we need to dig deeper and we need to dig into their context so we can flush out unstated and unconscious needs.” Kaftan expertly brought this point alive by using the popular Instagram app as an example. “We probably had a conscious need to share our photos on mobile,” Kaftan stated. He then asked, “but did we have a conscious need to be aesthetic with our photos?”

“Ultimately my point is about focusing on needs, threading them through meaning and creating culture with that,” Kaftan stated, “it’s about culture.” The message was brought home when he gave an example of the world renown iPod music device and how its cultural impact made consumers aware of their need to have an entire music collection in one place.

START WITH THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
“The first thing we need to recognize is that marketing is dead,” Kaftan said as he presented a quote from the Harvard Business Review. “People get informed from word-of-mouth, customer reviews and so on,” Kaftan said. The customer journey has changed from a traditional buying process relying heavily on advertising to a buying process that is more personalized. “We simply have so much more data to process now,” he pointed out, “there’s so much more information so whereas the old way we went from broad to narrow; we actually start narrow.”

For brands today it is harder to retain active loyalty from consumers because of competition, new technology and different ways people can now buy. It is imperative for a brand to maintain active loyalty. “We have to serve people more meaningfully; we have to go further,” Kaftan said. To support this idea; he gave an example of when he once had to return a television to Amazon. It’s excellent customer service made his experience with Amazon a meaningful one. “Wow, okay, I’m never not ordering a tv from Amazon,” Kaftan concluded the story.

CONTENT vs. TASK
This portion of the night dealt with the differences between content and tasks. Which one is to be designed first? “Content first verse task first is really a question of emphasis,” he said. It is not a matter of ‘either’ ‘or’ because both must be considered in design. The goal is to pay attention to both and understand that they do not interfere with interaction designs.

GO BEYOND THE SCREEN
The final dynamic of the night Jod Kaftan expressed his concerns for a single device performing all the functions one could humanly need. Everyone is staring at their phone screens. The crowd roared with laughter when he joked about the movie Wall-E. Connecting with fellow UX designers Kaftan stated, “While we need a seat at the table at the strategic level; we also need a seat at the product design level. We can create really cool, integrated experiences that are minimally invasive.”

The lecture was followed by a question and answer session. The Los Angeles web design community and UX designers were pleased to learn about designing with meaning. The topics were intriguing and were supported by relevant, everyday examples. Many thanks to speaker Jod Kaftan and host LA-UX Meetup for an engaging and informative evening! Also, thanks to the sponsor Yahoo! for providing a great venue and refreshments.

Taken from http://www.meetup.com/ia-55/events/74374102/.
Jod Kaftan is the Experience Design Director at BLITZ Agency in Santa Monica, CA. Prior to BLITZ, Jod worked at The Los Angeles Times, Schematic, Razorfish, Citysearch and AOL. In addition to being the Design Director at BLITZ, he is also a writer. And, as a writer, Jod has been published in Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, New York Magazine, This American Life and UX Booth.

Jod can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jodspeed.

Two words: online startups. In the past decade entrepreneurs have taken their business ideas to the web and online startups have been on the rise ever since. On August 15, Jaime Russell Levy showed the LA web design community how to successfully implement a User Experience (UX) strategy into their business.

After accomplishing many feats in the field of digital media including the creation of one of the first online magazines (WORD); Jaime Russell Levy shifted her attention to working more personally with clients in the field of user experience. “I started focusing my practice on working for startups, that’s where my heart is because you get to work with ideas from the very beginning,” Levy explained to the audience.

She reexamined her UX methodology after a client recommend a book called “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries to her. “I listened to the book for a day and a half and of course it changed my world,” Jaime Russell Levy stated. She displayed a chart to the LA web design community about the Lean Startup Methodology which caused her to rethink her own “waterfall” methodology.

The components of the Lean Startup Methodology were:

1. Start with an idea > then build
2. Build the product > test it and get data back
3. Learn > cycle around

Keeping in mind good business strategy; she then developed a definition for user experience strategy. “A formed alignment of an organization’s business objectives with a validated understanding of end user’s goals,” Levy told the audience. She explained that she wants to connect the dots between business strategy and user experience strategy because that is done long before developers start working on a website.

Part One: Product Discovery

1. Why User Experience for online startups is crucial
2. Aligning product vision with business goals
3. The exploration of a minimum viable product

Jaime Russell Levy took the LA web design community through several business cases to support these three steps in product discovery. “It can be your differentiator,” Levy said about the first step in product discovery. “A unique, kick-ass user experience can change the world,” she joked before showing a real life example of Airbnb (airbnb.com).

The second and third steps build off the first. The second step refers back to connecting the dots between business and user experience strategy. While the third step included examples for how to verify quantitative research in relation to validating qualitative research.

Part Two: Product Market Fit

“What’s our competition doing?” Levy asked the audience. It is important to know both your direct and indirect competitors. This helps to determine the real competition. She recommended a Gap Analysis and to look all around the landscape of your industry. Collect data and know how to make it useful. The website audience members used to buy tickets for this event (eventbrite.com) collected data for Jaime Russell Levy to test her hypothesis of who would be interested in learning about the benefits a good user experience.

Overall the evening was filled with laughter and valuable insight that can benefit those in the LA web design community whether a startup or established. Jaime Russell Levy was incredibly entertaining and engaging; not allowing for any dull moments. Many thanks to Jaime Russell Levy and the Coloft venue in Santa Monica for hosting this workshop!

Taken from eventbrite.com
Jaime Russell Levy (see Wikipedia article and LinkedIn profile) has been a pioneer for over 20 years in the creation of innovative browsing and non-linear storytelling experiences for products and services distributed on disk media, mobile devices, the Web and iTV. These days she runs a User Experience Strategy and Design practice in Los Angeles called JLR Interactive that caters to “lean” startups, helping them transform their business concepts into sustainable and scalable online solutions.
Throughout her career, Jaime has been a part-time college professor, for 7 years at NYU ITP and is currently teaching User Experience Design at UCLA Extension in the Fall/Spring quarters.

Do you work in the field of User Experience? What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments section below.

Technology of the 21st century has connected the world in some pretty unimaginable ways, however, it has not changed each country’s individual culture. When developing your website you must keep this in mind. On July 31 members of the Los Angeles web design community received a lesson in localization. Todd Lefelt and Kate Pendley of Huge Los Angeles discussed important considerations for localization and culturally sensitive design.

“This is about anything from currency convertors to colors to socially appropriate imagery,” said Kate Pendley describing the range of elements one must consider when communicating with a global audience. Todd Lefelt added, “Symbols mean different things in different countries.” An example shown was ‘thumbs up’ which carries a different meaning based upon the country you are in.

The specific case study presented to the LA web design community was Sigma-Aldrich, a life science technologies and speciality chemicals supply company for laboratories. The goal of their web design team was to create a localized website for the Chinese division of the Sigma-Aldrich website and also create an understandable e-commerce experience to replace the traditional catalog used by the international company.

Step 1

“Our initial approach to doing the landscape analysis was ‘we don’t want to go in knowing nothing’ obviously we want to educate ourselves as much as possible so we go in with some familiarity about best practice for Chinese design,” said Todd Lefelt. The team began by researching popular e-commerce sites in China.

Step 2

“The secondary research really actually evolved from doing the landscape anaylsis,” Kate Pendley said, “we started digging into mostly research and academic journals and some business cases coming out of large corporations.” This stage allowed the team to take note of trends in which it seemed a number of companies in China follow the same web design principles. Common features of these sites were information-dense pages and different forms of navigation.

Step 3

After becoming familiar with Chinese design trends; the team hopped on a plane to China and met with scientists in the laboratories. “It’s almost like asking them to give you a tour of their digital life,” said Todd Lefet, “we tried to make it observational.” The team had moderators between themselves and the scientists to clear up any language issues. The hands-on research allowed the team to see how a person in China usually behaves in terms of navigating the web. “They do want everything upfront and that included from general shopping to shopping on the Sigma-Aldrich site,” said Kate Pendley. In the realm of e-commerce Chinese users are more comfortable with websites stating all possible product information.

“Navigation, information architecture are super important considerations when you go into a different culture,” said Kate Pendley. An important factor was the layout of the page, as Americans scan left to right, Chinese users fixate in the inverse of Western users and scan in more circular patterns.

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

The night consisted mostly of web design trends in China but the Los Angeles web design community still received a world of knowledge in localization. A great social index system was discussed to highlight the ways countries are culturally different from each other. This system is Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions which include:

1. Long-Term Orientation
2. Power Distance
3. Uncertainty Avoidance
4. Individualism/Collectivism
5. Masculinity/Feminity

Some examples mentioned from above were how the Chinese are long-term oriented in their goals and do not require instant gratification that has become so commonplace in the United States. Another significant difference between the U.S. and China was how Chinese culture is more collectivistic. “It’s about the group, there’s a low emphasis on individuality where in the United States obviously the word is ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘mine’”, Pendley explained.

The LA web design community had so much to take away from this event. Todd Lefelt and Kate Pendley provided excellent examples of how to prepare oneself for designing in the global sphere and how to follow through. Their teamwork on the Sigma-Aldrich website showcased efficient preliminary research methods, observational research methods used on the ground in China and even gave a lesson on Geert Hofstede. The evening was followed by a Q&A section for the audience to re-sharpen their understanding of the wealth of information presented during the show. Many thanks to Todd Lefelt and Kate Pendley of Huge Los Angeles for sharing their findings with the Los Angeles web design community!

About the Speakers

Todd Lefelt – Managing Director, User Experience

Todd Lefelt is Managing Director, User Experience at Huge Los Angeles.  Since joining Huge in 2006, Todd has been instrumental in building the agency’s user experience team and helping to define the philosophy and processes applied to user-centric design.  In 2010, Todd joined Huge’s Los Angeles office, where he has played a key role in the development of the company’s West Coast presence.  Todd has directed interactive design and research for some of Huge’s largest engagements and has worked with clients including Clear Channel, National Geographic, NBC Universal, Samsung, Toyota, and Warner Music Group.

Kate Pendley – Experience Lead

With more than a decade of experience in digital, Kate is an Experience Lead at Huge, where she oversees complex projects and works with clients to drive research and interface design.  She is highly skilled in leading projects with engaging features built around solid IA, as well as solving design problems where users need an approachable interface to navigate complex functionality.  Prior to joining Huge, Kate worked with a variety of clients including ABC, American Express, At&T, CNN, Disney, Gerber, Microsoft, Taco Bell, Yamaha, and USAID.

About the Host:

Huge is responsible for core digital strategy, marketing and implementation for some of the largest companies and brands in the world. Founded in 1999, the company has evolved a methodology and a culture that combines the most powerful aspects of research, user-centered design, technology and marketing to meet client objectives. The online businesses designed and developed by Huge generate over $12.5 billion in annual revenue and are visited by more than 375 million visitors each month. The company has nearly 500 employees operating out of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, London and Rio de Janeiro. Huge is a part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

www.hugeinc.com

8/1, Wednesday

Mastering Youtube Webinar
Wed. August 1st @ 11am MST/ 1pm EST:
Would you like to have a robust YouTube account full of videos that you didn’t have to create? Learn how in this informative webinar. We’ll also show you how to organize your Channel and Playlists, how to optimize your videos for search, and we’ll even share powerful networking tips for using YouTube as a “Social” site.

8/2, Thursday

LA Tech Happy Hour
Ecco Ultra Lounge, 7pm.
ECCO Ultra Lounge is closing down for a few months to remodel – but before they do, we’re throwing a LATHH in the club!

8/4, Saturday

Dorkbot Social Tech Event
Dorkbot describes itself as “people doing strange things with electricity, mostly in Los Angeles”. These events can run the gamut from robotics to web design. Currently their site has yet to be updated, but I have been told by Techzulu that an event will occur.
1pm – 3pm
1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA (map)
Check the website for final dates, times, locations.

8/5, Sunday

LA iPhone App Developers
Let’s take a break and get together to discuss the iOS platform and what we’re building with it. Anyone who is a developer or has an interest in developing apps should join us.
No location scheduled yet, check site for upcoming details, 7pm.

8/7, Tuesday

August C++ , Oblong Industries Inc. 
We’re back in August with our regularly scheduled program.  We’ll have two longer form talks:  Blake Tregre is diving head, in to the wild waters of variadic templates, and Chris Smith will present Return Exceptions.  Punch and pie per usual. See you all then!

8/8, Wednesday

Long Beach Tech
Come connect with LBTECH!  Mingle with entrepreneurs and others who are growing the tech industry in Long Beach.  It will be a great setting aboard the Queen Mary.  The hours of the meetup are 6pm-8pm.

8/9, Thursday 

Silicon Beach Facebook Developers Meetup Kickoff!
Welcome to our newly-minted Meetup group! We’ll be having our first Meetup in early August, with a tentative date of August 9… so pencil it in your calendars now!

8/14, Tuesday

Don’t see your event?

Please contact us to have your Los Angeles Web Design events featured on our calendar.

The Los Angeles web design community received another lesson on user experience and interaction design when the IxDA (Interaction Design Association) hosted Dana Chisnell on July 18. Her lecture: Deconstructing Delight: Pleasure, Flow and Meaning took the audience on a journey across the web by displaying websites which embodied the best aspects of her Delight model. It is a framework that she has researched over the last few years and aims to take just usable stuff and turn it into designs that would really get people engaged in meaningful ways. Let’s take a look at what members of the Los Angeles web design community learned.

Pleasure

Pleasure is the first step taken to create a website that delights its users. Pleasure anticipates a user’s needs and wants, produces a positive effect and uses visual design and voice. Chisnell used popular sites like Swackett.com, TripIt.com and even Virgin America’s on plane safety video to show how visual appeal and responsive user interfaces can please users by garnering a reaction.
Evidences of pleasure were noted by:

• Smiling
• Exclamations (“Nice!” or “Got it!”)
• Behaving with infatuation.

“The hardest part of this is to do it without feeling fake,” said Dana Chisnell in regards to designing for pleasure. In other words do not divide the user’s attention between the purpose of your website and its aesthetics.

Flow

Flow is the second element of Chisnell’s Delight model and perhaps showed one of the most powerful examples of the night. The program Ommwriter (essentially a word processor) was the ultimate example of usability for those who want to feel in control. The program looks like a blank page, plays ambient music and keeps the fonts and features limited as a way to fully immerse the user into the writing experience (the precise reason one would be using this product in the first place). Ommwriter showed how a websites flow should be:

• Immersive,
• Empowering,
• Behavioral (automatic)

When designing for flow, Dana Chisnell asked, “Does it give you perspective?” as one of seven questions to answer when creating your website.

Meaning

In order to create meaning, your brand must be authentic about its intentions; not just throwing on a tagline. Meaning and engagement are interrelated because for a user they can create senses of both pride and passion for those who are brand loyal. About meaning, Dana Chisnell said, “When you’re designing for meaning, you’re creating and designing with purpose not just at the touch points but through culture, through intent.”

visceral

For a final and simplified thought on the evening’s discussion Chisnell clearly stated that pleasure is visceral, flow is behavioral and meaning wraps up both. After followed a Q&A session for the audience members to ask Chisnell any lingering questions. The Los Angeles web design community was given a night full of lively examples on how to design with delight. Many thanks to Dana Chisnell for sharing her insights with the LA web design community!

Dana Chisnell is an independent researcher currently working on usable security and research methods for social media usability. Through her research she has observed study participants to learn about design issues in software, hardware, web sites, online services, games, and ballots, and helped organizations perform usability tests and user research to inform design decisions for products and services. She co-authored the Handbook of Usability Testing Second Edition (Wiley, 2008) with Jeff Rubin. Dana also ran a successful fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to research, write, and publish a series of Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent.

About the hosting group: IxDA Los Angeles organizes bi-monthly events about topics related to interaction design. Our events help expose our local community to informative speakers and fun activities. Various companies host and sponsor events in offices throughout the greater Los Angeles area so that all parts of town have an opportunity to participate. Generally, our events occur mid-week, after business hours. From http://www.ixda.org/local/ixda-los-angeles.

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