We Do Search Engine Optimization.

While browsing the web we have all seen our share of good and bad site designs. This post lists 10 web design unspoken rules that will help you maintain a usable website and happy customers.

Choosing to ignore any of these rules could result in a complete loss of site visitors and receive flames from CSS gurus and web design forums

The Web Design Manifesto

1. No gratuitous use of animated gifs
2. Do not use blinking text.
3. Do not use Thou shalt not use marquee or rapidly moving text.
4. Do not label links ‘Click Here’
5. Do not use graphical flash intros with a ‘click here to skip intro’ button
6. Do not use background music that starts automatically
7. Do not use images in place of text
8. Do not use multiple font variations
9. Do not require Internet Explorer
10. Do not have animations or moving backgrounds behind text

Inspired by Dwight’s deadly sins of web design.

Guy Kawasaki’s new venture Alltop.com is looking for a logo and is having a contest to generate one. We decided to enter and created 6 variations. These were done by my amazing graphics colleague Darwin. He is a great addition to our web development team, and has an awesome name that is fun to say.

Checkout the logos for the uber venture capitalist’s website. You can enter the contest or read about how the logo contest began.

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Option 4

Option 5

Option 6

*Update – we won! Thanks to all the voters who chose our logo and Guy Kawasaki for the iPod touch. The real prize is being affiliated with this great website.

If you ask any recent college graduate how they get the majority of their information, they will probably tell you from online blogs. Press releases and newspapers are dying mediums and corporations that self publish quality news and information on weblogs will be at the top of mind and the center of awareness. It may even make you cool.

Professional service firms in consulting, IT, law, and accounting, need more than brochureware Web. These are usurped replaced by a new generation of web 2.0 sites (accurate, but not my favorite term) consisting of blogs, forums, tagging, RSS syndication, and expert opinion that create virtual business communities that attract and retain active users and clients.

The Bloom Group, a Boston-based market research organization found most business websites left buyers struggling to find details of their firms’ expertise and experience, and most sites failed to provide prospects an avenue to open a dialogue about their business problems.

Tips to serve active business seekers

• Provide more context for your content
• Implement guideposts – provide clear navigation instrucion locations and a large contact button on every page
• Use external credibility indicators and provide 3rd party reinforcement through testimonials, seals (BBB, trust-e, epinions, powerreviews)
• Contact forms & phone number are essential – prominently display a toll free phone number and address so visitors know you are accessible, open, and friendly. Companies that do not publish contact details loose trust.

Create compelling video and audio content to demonstrate your expertise and strengths as a business leader. Webinars, newsletters, forums and blogs provide new opportunities to engage with prospective clients and allow informal engagement before a contract is signed or service plan purchased. Give users and clients the ability to control when and where they interact with resources and information on your site.

Smaller firms who take risks and provide information freely to prospective clients have seen this gamble pay for itself. A large company, has extra resources to attract more business, but is too slow to react to changes and generally too conservative to provide helpful information at no charge. Information wants to be free, and the websites that provide it will reap all the rewards.

Google started off as a 100% free service, with no advertising and they have parlayed a quality service and user trust into a 200 billion company.

Muzeview research firm in New York surveyed the top 50 accounting firm websites in the U.S. and U.K. The CPA websites had copious text, newsletters, briefings, thought leadership surveys, case studies, and event invitations. The majority did not use audio, video, social networking, blogs and other interactive capabilities. Only 4 of the U.S. websites studied included podcasts or RSS feeds, 2 had blogs, 11 provided a podcast or video content.

Here is a huge opportunity to get in the top of mind with younger, tech savvy users.

Get new customers, get better search engine rankings, get noticed: get a blog.

Everyone talks about social networking, social marketing and online collaboration and these topics get lumped into the broad category web 2.0.

Ztail is putting money where your social mouth is and has created a website to share pricing information for everything.

Curious what your 1987 nintendo NES is worth? Wondering if you could actually sell your pair of Blu Blocker sunglasses on ebay and make a profit? Do legos hold their value? Post your product online at Ztail and get a valuation.

To post an item for appraisal you can either enter a description manually, or search through a database of over 1 million products provided by Shopping.com. Ztail uses third party sources including ebay.com to display photos, descriptions, reviews and current pricing data. Next, the item is added to Ztail’s “Get Worth” pool, displaying the item to other users who can provide their pricing opinions. Sellers can also create a Ztail widget, which can be embedded in the usual locations including facebook, blogs and other social networks to collect valuation opinions of friends.

After establishing a price, Ztail allows sellers to sell an item on eBay using established listing detail. This seems to be a no brainer: upload a product to get real world pricing data, then automatically post the item to ebay for sale. This should dramatically increase the effectiveness of auctions.

Ztail makes money from display ads, but I suspect the majority of their revenue is from the Ebay partner network and their encouragement of listing items for sale. They solve many problems with a variable pricing marketplace and enable transactions.

If they added their own affiliate program and an API to share data this would be one killer app.

Read more from the Ztail blog DemoGirl and TC.

Research shows that the highest performing site pages match exactly the motivation of a visitor, and that on retail websites most visitors fall into one of two categories:

1. Hunters. They already know what they want and are looking for the quickest, easiest, and safest way to get it and go.
2. Browsers. They may have ideas about a purchase but need more convincing, or they’re simply “window shopping.”

The problem most online retail sites face today? Their homepages have been developed without a clear understanding of the motivations and sequences of thought in the minds of visitors. You must create a site architecture to convert visitors into buyers.

Have an e-commerce optimization team look at store homepages and Value Propositions from your eCommerce site to get specific recommendations to improve your sites’ ability to engage both types of visitors – and convert them to customers.

MarketingExperiments.com has more details on e-commerce store conversion tactics: http://www.marketingexperiments.com improving-website-conversion/optimizing-ecommerce-websites.html

Portfolio of 63 design driven British companies that have beaten the stock market and proven the value of design dividends. This is not the NASDAQ but the FTSE.

British design focused companies growth

This graph shows the increased stock market value of companies that integrate design into their products, and invest in intangibles rather than the bottom line.

This stock market graph does not even include the most famous design oriented company on the planet, Apple, and the design orieited firms performed nearly 300% better.

If you want your company to succeed in a crowded marketplace, use design and quality to differentiate yourself.

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This is the first political post on this blog and I have no intention of making a habit of writing about politics. I do wish to share the presidential candidate calculator from vajoe.

I have no idea what Joe’s policital leanings are, but he has created an excellent non partisan site for comparing presidential candidates. How often will a politician answer your direct questions with a direct answer? This site has a database of information that seems to correctly show the opinions of our presidential hopefuls.

I now have a solid reference point to come back to if my chosen candidate makes decisions I disagree with.
I scored 88.5% for Barack Obama.

Left or right? No, this is not a political discussion but a serious usability question. Customers are used to seeing the checkout button on the right side of the screen, and crutchfield.com moved the buy not button to the left. Is it a good idea to buck convention and try something new to stimulate your electronics shoppers?

In this case no, the risk of shopping cart abandonment is to large. It is ok to test some website elements such as color or font style, but not something that is literally the foundation of your business. If people cant find the payment button bad things will happen to your online business.

Read what Future Now has to say about this unorthodox e-commerce setup.

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All web design customers want and need to know true web development costs. Creating a website is not an option for businesses, and since all businesses need an online presence the number of online design/development firms is growing exponentially. The question for consumers is how much does a website cost and how much should I pay for a site?

Here we can use an analogy from racing: “Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?”

It should come as no surprise that you get what you pay for, and a site that your friend’s college kid did for $1000 will not be the same caliber as a website designed by a professional ad agency for a large corporate client.

In general sites that have more pages, more functionality, interaction, dynamic components, multi user access, content management system and targeted landing pages will cost more than a simple 10 page brochure website.

Company $10-$50 million:
Advertising & promotion Client annual Web site campaign budget: $50,000-$110,000
E-commerce Shopping Cart: $45,000-$80,000
Search Engine Optimization: $40,000-$100,000/yr
Splash/landing/home pages (per page): $3,000-$6,000
Banners, Buttons, Flash animations: $2,000-$3,000

Company $1-$10 million
Advertising & promotion Client annual Web site campaign budget: $30,000-$60,000
E-commerce Shopping Cart: $30,000-$60,000
Search Engine Optimization: $15,000-$50,000/yr
Splash/landing/home pages (per page): $2,000-$4,000
Banners, Buttons, Flash animations: $1,000-$3,000

Company Under $1 million
Advertising & promotion Client annual Web site campaign budget: $15,000-$35,000
E-commerce Shopping Cart: $15,000-$40,000
Search Engine Optimization: $8,000-$25,000/yr
Splash/landing/home pages pages (per page): $1,000-$3,000
Banners, Buttons, Flash animations: $500-$2,000

This is a large spread, and you must be wondering why small companies generally get websites done cheaper. The main reason is friction, cronyism and job security.

Friction: large corporations have a long sell process that involves making multiple presentations to multiple individuals and internal groups and it an take a long time to get specs to begin a job. Also there are more hurdles and regulations to getting work signed off and making sites live. I know that at Disney.com the web design process is glacialy slow, with multiple layers of bureaucracy for each change and new feature.

Job Security: Larger companies have less room to risk on smaller, unproven design firms. It is much more likely a larger corporation will select a well known agency even if they are 50% more expensive than a smaller designer, just because of the agency’s track record. Also a corporation naturally understands multiple layers of management and may feel more comfortable working with this kind of vendor.

Cronyism: It is easier to hide costs in a large company. If the person in charge of hiring a web design firm has a friend or associate who works at a big design firm like Avenue A/Razorfish you want to give them the business even if it costs your firm more, because it could pay off for this person in the future. This selection decision may not be in the best interest of the corporation, only the selection committee.