Because they work best together.

Good marketing brings in qualified traffic; good design turns visitors into customers. If you can improve both at once, the benefits compound.

The combination of traffic and a good conversion rate can be very powerful.

When we build sites, we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view. And while our customers value good-looking sites, they’re making an extra investment in order to get a site that brings in more revenue. We’re always able to redesign a site so it gets more revenue per visitor — but what about bringing in more visitors?
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When it comes to some of the coolest, most aesthetically pleasing, eco-friendliest, and trendiest items to own, SIGG is at the top of my list.

SIGG, “The Original Swiss Bottle” is an urban hipster necessity. The bottles themselves are made from reusable aluminum, and can be seen in the hands of the world’s trendsetters, from Sunset Boulevard to Park Avenue. SIGG can boast of over three thousand custom designs, and they win plaudits for their environmentally friendly manufacturing.

Recently I stumbled onto SIGG’s ecommerce arm (mysigg.com), wanting to buy another water bottle for a friend after receiving a SIGG over the Christmas holidays.

Let’s just say that my first impressions were a bit disappointing.

Having worked with successful ecommerce clients before, I could see lots of room for improvement. I asked my colleagues here at Blue Fountain Media a few questions about the site:

• “What do you like about mysigg.com?”
• “What are some of the things you dislike?
• “What are some suggestions?”

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This is a follow-up to yesterday’s How to write a spec doc, and is for those on the consumer side of web development, and also for those web developers who are thinking “is a spec doc really necessary?”

“Specifications Document.” “Information Architecture.” What they mean and why your website quote isn’t complete without them

So you’ve called a few website companies and they may have told you it’s necessary to complete a specifications document, information architecture, research or discovery phase, but what exactly is that, and why is it necessary before giving a quote for the work?
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Any large website needs careful planning and information architecture before development begins, and that means creating a specifications document. A successful website deployment depends on this document just as the house you live in began on paper as architectural blueprints. However, many web developers either don’t realize this, or don’t know how to create a spec doc. If you suffer from the latter affliction, here is a handy guide to our habitual process, as well as some helpful hints.
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Your website is getting traffic, but these visitors aren’t taking action. Is it time for a redesign? Before you scrap the whole design and start from scratch, consider if it’s only a few elements on the page that are hindering your success. And thanks to Google Website Optimizer, there’s an easy way to find out using real user behavior.

It’s a little ironic to talk about best practices when the whole point of testing is that websites are not one-size-fits-all; best practices for page layout, calls-to-action, and information architecture might not apply to your specific niche of users. Nevertheless, here are some tips for setting up experiments that should apply most of the time:

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Writing for search engines is becoming increasingly like writing for humans. Search engines used to base rankings for a particular keyterm on the frequency of the term in question on a page. Today, many more factors are taken into account by Google’s algorithms, with the goal of determining the relevancy of the document to the user’s search query. As a general rule, it is more important to write natural sounding articles than to target them at robots. Here are some of the various factors to consider when writing for search engines:

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In journalism and in SEO, we are told that “content is king”. It is true that killer content is what will draw attention and ultimately lead to an increase in readership/inbound links. But perhaps it is also important to pay attention to format as well. For example, WIRED is not nearly as fun to read online as it is in magazine format.

But then again, I have come across a wide variety of literary pieces via Google Book Search that I would have never sought out in a library. It is very important for businesses to look into what format they should use when providing information to users. The point is to engage audiences and draw attention organically with strong content distributed in the right format.

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A great post by Jono of Mozilla Labs explains very well what should go into the design of user interfaces. Simplicity is the key and reducing the amount of friction between the interface and the user to a minimum. Keeping the number of options to a minimum while still allowing the user free reign to execute all desired tasks from anywhere in the interface is key to a successful design. Adaptive Blue’s blog also mentions Apple’s Jonathan Ive who says, “The task is to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense of how difficult this thing was.” (Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain )

You are receiving thousands of visitors every week. They are qualified visitors, resulting from search queries for precisely services and products that you sell. Only one problem: they are not buying. You have a problem with customer retention on your website. In 90% of cases, this is due to the design of your website. It’s time to re-think your website design.

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Did you notice anything different about the above business information? It may look like your usual company details, but it is enhanced by a mark-up standard known as the hCard, one of many “microformat” standards that are available for use on your website.

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