Pack a Mail Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Design’

Many businesses are moving their web sites toward CMS platforms so they can quickly serve up fresh content on a regular basis. This is a great way to keep visitors and search engine spiders coming back. But it’s not a solution to ineffective copy, especially on static pages of your site. And even CMS sites have static pages – About, Services, Contact, etc. – with content that can quickly get stale or simply stop functioning when they should be getting site visitors to act.

Perhaps you just threw those core pages together, your stats show the pages aren’t converting well, or you’re just long overdue for a revamp. The good news is that freshening up your web copy doesn’t have to take long to do and can have a noticeable impact. Here are a few updates to consider.

Update Your Bio

If you’ve recently won an award, presented at a conference or completed a training program, you should work it into your bio. But you don’t need a major change in your credentials to revisit the copy here. Does the page quickly sum up the highlights of your background and experience, show a little of your personality and make it easy for visitors to “get you?” If not, reworking this page is a great idea.

Add a Social Element

If you have a LinkedIn account, Facebook fan page, Twitter account or blog that you use for business, your site should have easily identifiable links or icons found throughout your site. If you tweet primarily business-oriented content, you may even want to incorporate your Twitter feed right into your site.

Change Up Formatting

It’s amazing what a visual facelift can do for your copy’s readability and interest factor. If you have solid paragraphs of copy, try adding bullets and subheadings to break it up and make it easier to read. Even something as simple as changing your link styles (color, decoration, etc.), can make visitors more willing to click around.

Cut It In Half

Paragraph after paragraph of text is rarely effective. It’s just too much information that your visitors probably don’t care about or don’t have time to read through. If changing up the formatting doesn’t help on its own, take a good long look at your copy and ask yourself if you really need that much. There is probably a shorter and more direct way to get the point across.

Repeat Your Call to Action

You want your site visitors to do something; you wouldn’t have a web site if you didn’t. That call to action needs to be placed on every page where it’s relevant. Do you want them to schedule a call, email you for your rates, opt-in to your list? Tell them that, and don’t be afraid to repeat it.

When is the last time you took a close look at your core pages? Do you think a freshening up is in your future?

Tables are our friends in Website Design! They allow us to show large amounts of information in a small space, but when designing tables for print or the web there are a number of guidelines you should keep in mind. The main aim when creating a table of data is to make it easy to digest what otherwise could be a large chunk of textual information. It’s the designer’s job to choose suitable backgrounds, borders, typography and images that go into a table to make it eye-catching and informative.

1. Breathing Space. Make sure the data in the table cell has some padding around it so that the information is easy to read.

Big Cartel

2. Typography. Generally it’s a good idea to avoid script and decorative typefaces and instead choose clean, legible serif or sans-serif fonts.

Fluxiom

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I expect to receive some flak for this article as it attacks fellow web designers and developers.

However, it’s time to provide a list of typical mistakes made by new web developers — but we were all novices at one time. Some

points may also apply to that antagonistic co-developer who refuses to accept any notion that their code isn’t perfect……

1. Ignoring web standards Web standards were invented for a reason: they help you create device-independent web sites and applications. Few people want to learn them, not everyone likes them and most developers will disagree with some aspects — but ignore them at your peril!

A novice developer will make typical mistakes such as:

• forgetting or using inappropriate DOCTYPEs. I still don’t understand why so many developers use a transitional DOCTYPE — do they really want to add font tags and background attributes?
• using old-school HTML such as table layouts and center elements
• not appreciating the subtleties of inline or block elements, e.g. putting h2 headings inside a span
• not validating their code. Or worse, using a validator then ignoring the results and arguing that validators are inherently flawed.

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We received the following question today:

“For certain sales pages on my site I do not want to have the distraction of the sidebar items. Is there a way to have a second page template without a sidebar for this purpose?”

Having an optimized sales/landing page does help with sales conversion and it is really easy to create a custom sales/landing page in WordPress. Any readers of this site using the WordPress Simple Shopping cart orWordPress eStore or the WordPress Membership Plugin are most likely selling something online. In this article I have explained how you can create a custom sales page easily in WordPress and use it to optimize your sales conversion.

How do You Create a Custom Sales Page in WordPress?

The answer is custom WordPress page template. Your WordPress theme has a file called “page.php”. When you create a WordPress page, by default it uses this “page.php” template file which makes the page look a certain way. You can easily create another template file which has a different look/structure and use that template file for a particular page.

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Last year we ran a blog post titled “Top 40 lists of lists” which got a lot of good feedback so we thought we would make it an annual event. Here is 2010’s top 40 list of lists. They have been grouped in to broad categories of:

• Coding and scripting
• Web design
• Freelancing
• Web copy & blogging
• Social media
• Online marketing
• WordPress
• Analytics, optimisation & usability

Coding & scripting
10 useful online code editors
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/10-useful-online-code-editors

22 handy HTML5 / CSS3 tools, resources and guides
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/resources/22-handy-html5-css3-tools-resources-and-guides/

35 fresh JavaScript jQuery tools and resources
http://www.noupe.com/javascript/35-fresh-javascript-jquery-tools-and-resources.html

45 fresh useful JavaScript and jQuery techniques and tools
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/12/45-fresh-useful-javascript-and-jquery-techniques-and-tools/

43 essential controls for web applications
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/essential-controls-for-web-applications/

Web design
44 free stylish graffiti fonts for designers
http://naldzgraphics.net/freebies/44-free-stylish-graffiti-fonts-for-designers/

100 essential web development tools
http://www.noupe.com/tools/100-essential-web-development-tools.html

40 fundamental illustrator tools you must know
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/tutorials/fundamental-illustrator-tutorials/

30 examples of attractive nav
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/30-examples-of-attractive-nav/

9 things you can’t forget when designing a blog
http://www.tutorial9.net/web-tutorials/9-things-you-cant-forget-when-designing-a-blog/

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