Development

Why Country Sites Are So Bad

Summary: When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don’t communicate.

Something was gnawing at me as I observed our last several rounds of international usability studies. Many of the websites we tested around the world had uncommonly low quality — not unlike what we saw in the United States during the 1990s.

Reflecting on this observation, I realized that the worst sites were usually not the truly local sites designed by local businesses or government agencies. Instead, the offenders often came from huge multinational corporations that fielded country sites with horrible usability.

By |Development, HCI, Psychology, Usability, Web Marketing|2 Comments
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Search Engine Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: The Showdown

When it comes to driving traffic to your website, there are a variety of ways to get visitors. The primary two that individuals and businesses almost always have a struggle with investing their time and money into are search and social. Sometimes the issue is convincing people why these are a necessity for a thriving business. Other times, the conflict is whether to invest in one marketing strategy more than the other, or to only pursue one marketing strategy but not the other.

How Search Beats Social

First of all, let’s look at the reasons why you might want to choose search engine marketing over social media marketing.

More People Look for Business on Search

Think about your own habits. Whenever you are looking for something, from an air conditioning repair company to a zumba instructor, where do you go first? Most likely, you will go to a search engine – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL, Blekko, or one of the many other options available.

A report by Econsultancy found that 61% of consumers use search engines to help them in product research before making a purchase. This means that if you want to get discovered, you will want to rank well for your target keywords.

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Browser and GUI Chrome

Summary: “Chrome” is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.

What do we mean when talking about the “chrome” in a user interface design? An attendee asked this question during a recent course on Visual Design for Mobile and Tablet. Whenever someone asks us a basic question, I assume that many more people want the answer as well — and thus, this article on chrome.

  • Definition: Chrome is the visual design elements that give users information about or commands to operate on the screen’s content (as opposed to being part of that content). These design elements are provided by the underlying system — whether it be an operating system, a website, or an application — and surround the user’s data.
  • Not coincidentally, “Chrome” is also the name of Google’s web browser, though I don’t use the term in that sense here.

I don’t know who came up with the term “chrome,” but it was likely a visual analogy with the use of metal chrome on big American cars during the 1950s: the car body (where you sit) was surrounded by shiny chrome on the bumpers, tail fins, and the like.

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Pros and Cons of Major CMS Systems

Many companies approach us and ask, “I want to maintain and update my own website. What CMS system do you suggest?” When reviewing content management systems (CMS) with clients, we go over the pros and cons of the most popular systems, and evaluate their background and website capabilities to ensure that the correct CMS system is selected for your company. Sometimes a CMS system is not the solution for a company, and an affordable monthly maintenance program is more appropriate.

Following, we discuss the pros and cons of three major CMS systems: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

By |Development, HCI, Social Media, Usability, Web Marketing|8 Comments
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Did Your Shopping Cart Survive the Holiday Season?

From 2005 to 2010, Cyber Monday sales (the Monday after Thanksgiving) have more than doubled, as illustrated. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal showed an increase of 22% in sales on Cyber Monday in 2011, compared with the 2010 holiday season.

According to research firm Score, Inc., the 2011 holiday season saw a 15% increase in web sales over 2010, for a total of $35.5 billion in online sales (while overall holiday spending was up just 3.8% from 2010).

The holiday season is not just about selling products to your customers. It also involves keeping those that come for the first time, and keeping them there. As said by Jakob Nielsen, “It’s an old lesson: It’s much easier to close additional sales with existing customers than to acquire new customers. People who’ve proven willing to give you money will often give you more. This is true for all sales channels, but it’s particularly crucial for e-commerce because the first order proves your credibility if you effectively handle follow-up and delivery.”

By |Development, HCI, Psychology, Social Media, Usability, Web Marketing|3 Comments
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Improving Users’ Visits with a Website Audit

Last week, we talked about the importance of doing a year-end business review. This week, we will present the importance of doing a website review.

By |Communities, Development, Social Media, Usability, Web Marketing|1 Comment
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Like Butter, Baby!

butter Like Butter, Baby!

Excessive HTTP Requests: Saturated Fat for the Mobile Web

Butter makes it better. Anyone who has enjoyed a nice French meal knows what we mean. Nevertheless, if you have a weak ticker and your arteries cannot handle it, fat can be a killer.

HTTP requests are the butter of the Web. They enrich the desktop experience with unperceivable impact; but on the mobile Web, the added latency can bring your site to its knees. The impact is devastating when you’re dealing with inherently slower processor speeds and are dependent on a wireless mobile network.

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The Human Touch of SEO

google adwords The Human Touch of SEO
As online marketers become more aggressive with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns, there can become a point at which businesses begin to over-optimize. When focusing purely on SEO, many companies lose sight of the end goal, which is to provide information to users.

Even when you are following all of the more recognized SEO rules, when is optimization overdone and how can you prevent this from happening on your website? Are there Tsunami warning indicators to get out of the game before Google’s next Panda or Farmer update? And how do you find the ideal balance for your site, not overdoing SEO but also not leaving organic search traffic to your competitors?

By |Development, HCI, Psychology, Web Marketing|5 Comments
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How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?

Summary: Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer because visit-durations follow a negative Weibull distribution.

How long will users stay on a Web page before leaving? It’s a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same:

  • Not very long.

The average page visit lasts a little less than a minute.

As users rush through Web pages, they have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit (let alone all those they don’t). So, unless your writing is extraordinarily clear and focused, little of what you say on your website will get through to customers.

By |Development, HCI, Psychology, Usability, Web Marketing|5 Comments
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Title Tags of Top Sites – Mastering Search

When it comes to on-site search engine optimization, few elements are more important than the title tag.

For those unfamiliar with the term “title tag,” it describes the text that appears in the top line of a user’s Web browser. It is also used by search engines as the actual title of a search listing.

If you run an SEO campaign, then you should be very interested in how title tags are currently used — and how they can be improved — on your site. If you run an SEO campaign and are a savvy SEO, you’ll also notice how competitors use title tags on their Web properties.

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