Tips, Tricks, and Advice

Archive for the ‘Tips, Tricks, and Advice’ Category

A Quality Control Checklist For A Quality Design

Before, during, and after every design project, we have a checklist of tasks that are to be completed. Below are some of the action items on our quality-control checklist.

(BEFORE) Gather requirements and needs of the project.
(BEFORE) Create a full mockup of the design.
(DURING) Develop website using clean code optimized for best search engine results.
(AFTER) Make sure design is displayed correctly across all web browsers.
(AFTER) If project is for a client, make sure they know how to properly use all features of the website.

The offset of each of these tasks are making sure the website is structurally sound, while ensuring an optimized product. While they all seem like obvious tasks, many design firms skip or rush past checking any of these items, which can lead to a broken finished product and one not suited to the client ‘s business needs.

Tips To Create Compelling Squeeze Pages

The conversion rate is essentially the “rate of success” per user. In other words, the probability that a user will take action on whatever you are offering whether it be filling a form or buying your product.

Obviously, the higher the rate the better.

The goal that every website owner, designer, and marketer continue to work on is finding better ways to keep inching that conversion rate higher and higher.

Simple factors like color, copy, and location of the call to action can drastically impact the rate of success (positively and negatively).

Below is an example of one of ASANT Media’s project’s, Chart Pattern Manifest, squeeze page that has a 44% conversion rate. Again, in other words, there is a 44% chance the user will sign up to the list when they visit the site.

To some 44% might seem low, but industry average for email lists are usually around 10-20%.

So what makes this particular squeeze page better?

Over the last couple of months, we have been testing out different formats, schemes, and copy material, below are some tips we have taken away to creating a compelling squeeze page.

1. Make it short – When you are giving something away for free, there shouldn’t be too much selling needed. If your offer is actually good, then a few sentences should suffice.

In our CPM example, you can see we pretty much summed everything up in the title of the page.

2. Make the form stand out – We found the best positioning for a form to be above the fold and to the right. It also helped to make the textfields larger and have the labels in a different font and color from the general text.

In our CPM example, we put the form labels in a green Georgia font and created large textfields and submit button (labeled ‘subscribe’).

3. Social proof – Everybody likes to be part of something. If you already have a signficant amount of users as part of your list, community, or whatever, then show it off.

In our CPM example, we simply threw up a counter of users subscribed to our service.

4. Identify persona – We tested this item a couple times. Is it important to let people know who is behind the product? We found it was important to create that relationship and let users know we aren’t hiding anything.

In our CPM example, we put “created by TheWildInvestor.com” in the first sentence. Even if users don’t know what that is they can check.

It is important to constantly test and tweak design factors when it comes to sales/squeeze pages to see what works best with your specific audience.

Is Your Flash Site Hindering Your Business?

Being an owner of an online media business, obviously I always need to be on top of what design and marketing practices are being implemented. While things come and go, it still always makes me cringe every time I land on a 100% flash created website.

Whether it looks good or not, coding your site 100% in flash basically does more harm than good.

For those unfamiliar with how web coding and design works, there are basically two form of sites: flash and non-flash. Take the following example to help distinguish the difference:

Compare two identical parks: Park 1 is trapped within a glass box (flash site); Park 2 is not (non-flash site).

Which park do you think people will go to? Obviously the one not in a glass box because people can go into the park and interact with all the amenities it has to offer. Nobody just wants to look at the park just from the outside. This is exactly the effect flash has on a site.

Search engine spiders can’t read it.
Usability for readers is just horrendous.
There are no back buttons and no right click options.

Overall, the functionality and usability of flash sites are completely pointless and not solving our main problems.

Moreover, the overall design appeal of flash sites tend to be annoying to most users as well. In today’s internet world we have trained our head to think flashy, animated objects are spam. If we add all these things in our flash site, then what good does it do?

When flash is good to use. While I never believe flash is good except for some game or unique marketing campaign, there are coding techniques that allow flash to take on characteristics of non-flash sites; however, that requires some deep pockets, which is never really good on our bottom line.

Buying vs. Selling: What to Do?

Forget about just making money online, when you are dealing with anything that has to do with some sort of income we all would like to make money right now; however, the desire to experience satisfaction now might hinder that feeling a couple months down the road.

With any business, revenue is usually generated in an exponential format… meaning your money grows exponentially over time. While you make a couple cents in the first month, the next month could bring a couple dollars, followed by a couple hundred, and so on. The ability to see passed the rough patch and keep you eye on the end goal is what separates successful ventures from fallen one.

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An Unique Business Name. Its About Brand Awareness

Being in my position, I am constantly being pitched new business ideas and concepts. One question I always ask is what will be the name of your business or this particular project? Most of the time I receive some boring same-old name.

Take a second to think about this…

At some point of your business lifespan, you can change everything… except the company name. You can always change the product, logo, rebrand, and so on, but you can never change your company’s name. If anything, you have to create something else under another identity if you want to ditch your name.

For the most part people understand this, but because of that they are scared to be creative when choosing a name, rather they are looking for what I call a descriptive name (i.e. Bob’s Dry Cleaner, The Electronic Shack, etc).