New blog design in progress. Excuse the scaffolding. This is just a short about section where you can describe yourself and your site. You'll want to keep it fairly long because there are some layout issues that arise if the area is below a certain width.
When designing your website for the first time or working on an overall redesign make a list of your most important goals. Then make a list of the most important content that supports these goals. The rest of the design flows from these two lists. The order of priority and the visual presentation of information on your site should always follow these three simple but crucial steps.
1. Clearly state what you do and the benefits to the user
2. Follow that with an impressive client list and client testimonials
3. Have a clear call to action to contact with you now
If a user is not ready to engage with you now, find a way to capture their details to continue the conversation and for future marketing opportunities by:
1. Include an email subscribe
2. Give a great reason why the user should subscribe
3. Give something away, a chapter of a book, eBook, or an article to encourage sign ups and build trust.
4. Remove the captcha on the sign up form. The few spam sign ups are worth the hassle compared to the leads you will lose.
Anything not on the above list should be removed or reduced in importance. Tighten up all spacing. Make sure the overall design is clean and clear, make it scanable and easy to find key information quickly.
The essence of a great redesign is “no time wasters please”. You don’t want to waste your time and money creating a site that will confuse and annoy your users. Secondly, you do not want to waste these users time. It is bad form. Nobody has time to thrawl through badly designed sites that do not give us the information we need.
Follow these few simple steps and your redesign will convert more and lead you and your user on a mutually beneficial journey.
Award season is in full swing and we are thrilled to announce that Doc on One won Gold at the Digital Media Awards on Saturday night. Doc on One was an extremely ambitious project. The documentary team transferred over 300 documentaries from the archives online for the very first time. Launched last July, the Doc on One has become one of the most popular sites in Ireland and the Gold for best in Podcasting is well deserved indeed. It was such a pleasure to work on this project and we hope Doc on One continues to win more listeners and awards this year.
For the curious among you, this week’s documentary is “Ten minutes from Kenema”. Have a listen here, pure listening pleasure.
We had a very busy, creative 2009 so I thought you’d like to see work we launched in December.
On time for the Christmas season we created a cross channel media campaign for SafeFood. The campaign featured a festive website, email newsletter, Facebook fan page, Facebook landing page,Twitter page and a quirky competition. First, we built a new festive website for SafeFood showcasing all their fantastic Christmas content. We integrated the “I still love turkley” campaign on Twitter and Facebook to tie into the safe cooking message and to highlight all the creative goodness leftover Christmas food can make. The campaign also ran on Boards.ie were SafeFood gave their expertise to help those entertaining friends and family to make the perfect Christmas feast.
Overall the new campaign was very successful with great traffic through the site and hopefully a few less disasters in the kitchen! It is really good to see how an intergrated approach like this can grab the imagination of users and generate lots of attention.
The SafeFood team are busy, passionate people so along with the Christmas campaign we also worked on the redesign of Weigh2Live. Weigh2Live makes it easy for anyone who wants to make changes to their diet and lifestyle. You may have seen the TV ad campaigns running on RTE at the moment. It’s a great resource for new year resolutions and for the rest of the year as well. The site also contains handy tools that will help you stay on track and keep you motivated. A good positive start for the new year for all of us.
In December we continued to work with our friends over on Rehab Bingo. Over the Christmas holidays the newly redesigned Rehab Bingo site was launched with the addition of a few new characters and extra functionality to help playability.
Have a look at the right game sidebar and you will find our new feature game Barnyard Bill. With a colourful array of farm animals and our kindly farmer Bill we are delighted with the reaction to the new game with Rehab Bingo players.
Take a look at our other feture game this month Bee Mine just in time for Valentines Day. Good luck and happy playing.
With all that creative output in December we are busy putting the finishing touches to a few more projects which we will announce in February. Will keep you posted!
We are known for a quite clean, crisp style of design so it was a lot of fun recently to break from that for a few design projects. Michele over at Blacknight posted a few of his new magazine adverts today. One for Total Film magazine and the other for SFX.
I especially had fun with the movie one :)
How time flies, FineTuna is a year old. Odd things often happen around birthdays; I think they call it synchronicity, with a lovely review on Site Point today and a push from the Tuesday Push tomorrow.
We had one goal for FineTuna, to become the TinyURL of design feedback. Simple, fast and disposable after you have your point accross.
We got such a positive response that we decided to build it and so a concept became a reality. And we never imagined just how many people would love it. The statistics are truly amazing. Over 25,000 images have been uploaded, shared and reviewed with more than 9 gigs uploaded.
It is really interesting to see how the initial concept for the website changed from how we thought it would work, to what we have a year on. The upload functionality with the Firefox extension really helped its usability. We also decreased the number of buttons from 5 to 4 making things simpler all round.
FineTuna unleashed a truck load of reviews and mentions including TechCrunch, CSS Mania, cnet, and many others during the past year. We are very proud of the coverage FineTuna has received and thank everyone for using, promoting and pushing our efforts.
BEN is a new site from the team here showcasing beautiful email newsletter designs. Updated regularly it features email marketing from around the world. Great for when you are looking for a bit of inspiration.
Not a blog review but a record of my push :)
I gave a talk at the Netimperative Digital Roadshow in Dublin yesterday. The topic was:
How to engage a two-way conversation
How to ensure the ultimate user experience
And of course I had to mention that there are some great tools available to businesses to encourage and engage in the conversation and go check out IGOPeople.
I hope to have the talk online in the next few days.
We are delighted to announce that www.droghedaunited.ie has been nominated for the 2008 Soccer Writers’ Association of Ireland club website of the year award. The new revamped site, designed and developed by Spoiltchld, launched earlier this year to amazing support form all at Drogheda United and Drog’s fans worldwide. A busy site with much contribution from fans young and old, it is a hub of activity with updated fixtures and results, club notes and gallery. Also making the shortlist this year is our near neighbours Dundalk FC and the Cork City FC. All of us at Spoiltchild wish Drogheda United the best of luck. Up the Drog’s!
Ages late on this one.
I am going to try something a little different with this feedback and do it visually with some of the reasoning Spoiltchild uses when approaching a UI design and selling a site.
eWrite is a simple web based tool that lets you edit the content on your own website. And that’s it. Did you need something more? It does exactly what it says on the tin. Give the demo a try.
Log in to eWrite, give it the address of your website, choose from the list of your web pages which one to edit and then you are presented something similar to a Microsoft word page where you can edit your content. It costs 200 euro for the year which is worth it but may be a hard sell in its current form. More on that later.
Start marketing inside your product.
Marketing and selling a product does not start and end outside your product.
The traditional thinking is advertise, talk about your product and even now the push is to engage with your potential customers in social media such as Social networks, blogs and forums. The goal being to get customers to try your product.
That’s great so far but it is only half the battle.
You have to Sell to them when they are in the product.
Make them think they are brilliant that they find your app so easy to use (they are brilliant, they bought your product didn’t they) Let them feel powerful and in control of this technology lark by allowing them to always know where they are, what they are doing and what to do next.
Make it look and feel easy to them.
And if they do have any difficulty make it easy to find you, explain their problem and get a solution.
This is the part of the marketing loop that you have complete control over, doesn’t keep costing as time goes on.
Once a user has found a great product that makes them feel great, they will tell their friends. People love sharing great products and services to others. It makes the look smart, helpful and generous. So while the list of functions might include stuff like Import web page, text formatting, image uploading etc. At the top of that list needs to be “Makes user look and feel smart”.
Good marketing helps sell your product. Great product helps sell your marketing.
Without this you have twice the fight and 4 times the expense in marketing your product. Marketing within your product is actually remarkably easy and its a one time job of which the benefits far outweigh the little effort.
I am a big fan of Seth Godin as you can guess and his book on this subject “Purple Cow“ is a must read for anyone building and selling a product.
So back to eWrite. While it is a great, really simple tool that does exactly what it says. It looks like a developer made it. It looks functional. It is missing the marketing within the product that will make it easier to sell.
Redesigning eWrite
Its all good and fine talking about it so I am going to put my time where my mouth is. I am going to take one of the pages from the application and do a bit of reworking to the style and UI. As you will see functionally it does exactly the same but it becomes a much easier sell and a product a customer will find much easier sell to friends and colleagues.
This is the current dashboard screen of eWrite.
My main problem is the gray
Makes it look like a really technical dry product. Which it is not.
And it is not how it is being sold. Texty, gray, unorganised = Difficult and technical.
With all the colours available in the colour pallet why choose gray.
I do know why. It is a neutral colour. An easy inoffensive choice that no one could ever have a problem with. But as you see neutral and inoffensive is very hard to sell. What’s more you look like a huge number of other similar neutral and inoffensive products out there. No one wants to blend in.
Free advertising for all!
When building our own products within Spoiltchild our design is our easiest, cheapest most effective form of online advertising for our products. And I don’t mean that in an “our design is fabulous and pretty ra ra ra” way but in a very quantifiable way.
Everyone loves lists. The top 10 of this, the very best of that etc. They have been around forever and most likely will always be. This exists for design as anything else. Design gallery websites are a hugely popular version of this. Sites like CSSMania (CSS everything else), Smashing Magazine, FWA etc all boast thousands of visitors daily.
Taking CSSMania as an example. A side bar banner would cost 1250$ a month.
Our app Finetuna.com was featured for free on the CSS Mania site on 9th of June,08 as an example of good design. Top spot on the home page. As a result it then got featured on a host of similar CSS / gallery sites around the world and picked up and reviewed by individual blogs.
We reckon if we had paid for that exposure on those sites alone it would have cost over €5000. Which is more then it cost to build and host the entire application. We have submitted and got it featured on a whole heap of other sites on top of that. I wrote about this before.
Now traffic like that is great and ideally targeted for a product like Finetuna. But it they are not your target market they still generate huge link love to help your page rankings. Its a great initial boost and sticks around for the long tail.
So its worth spending a bit of time on the design.
Below is a small bit of time I spent on the dashboard screen. Followed by some of my reasoning behind each change. Click to view larger.
Frame removed. There was no need for this to take up screen real estate and the Photoshop bevel made it look dated.
More colour added to make it appear easier, lighter and friendlier. This scheme taken from their new logo.
The logo. eWrite are obviously aware of what can be improved within the design as they already commissioned this logo.
Terminology and Icons. I adjusted some of the terminology used within the interface to make it more accessible to a non techy user.
Added written and visual cues to let a user know where they are and what they can do next.
The resource limits of the account were previously at the bottom of the screen. This makes sense if you are a new user and have hardly used any. But as a user approaches the limits its importance grows so I thought it best to make a user aware of their status from the get go.
I de prioritised the news section. On the original it seems like it has equal billing to the actual application which is certainly not the case. I would even suggest a way to hide the new after it has been read.
Overall more attractive, better spacing, more friendly. LOOKS easier to use.
I believe it targets the core market better and makes it easier to sell. Would you be more tempted to click TRY at http://www.ewritecork.com/ if you seen screens like this?
This is just one screen but this reasoning can be applied site wide and should cut down on the effort needed to get that next customer, and the next …
That’s the application itself. The home screen also needs to be looked at.
Gordon can correct me if I am wrong but the space I see eWrite targeting means it is sitting alongside the following companies and products. Not by functionality but by target user.
A simple side by side comparison shows how the home page compares to the competition.
The home page
Its difficult for a start up to hire design expertise if they don’t have it in house. This is not to be an advert to hire a designer but as you can see above it can more then pay for itself if you do.
However, there are lots alternative options out there. This is where I use the dirty word that gets hate stares from designers. Templates. In the last few years templates have come on in quality that they really are a viable option now. And while I don’t suggest using them exactly as given, use them as a starting point. Once you apply your own branding and content needs on them they should end up suitably changed that they don’t look the same as everyone else and you are displaying your information clearly.
* Just a note that a redesign like this is just a starting point. To make it truly effective you need to test it, measure, tweak it, test it, tweak it ….
