The best creative web design for clients all have one thing in common; image quality. Images are the number one visual way information is communicated and in the day and age of increasing demands for quick information, images do a great job at telling a story quickly for site visitors. Images are crucial for efficient web design because they break up content on pages which can be overwhelming for visitors. Essentially, people want information fast, and when they don’t get the answer to a search phrase, they leave the site (contributing to high bounce rates, low conversions, and lowered SEO scores). What better way to convey information quickly than through pertinent images paired with good keyword-heavy content aiming to match a visitor’s search phrase?
Efficient use of images can be hugely beneficial to a site and can add to a business’s branding, their tone toward visitors, their business’s image, efficiency in converting visitors, guiding efficient site-navigation, SEO, and much more. Images work hand in hand with creative web design and are increasingly recognized in their importance in conveying information:
“A common finding is an observed processing superiority of pictures as compared to words, suggesting that pictures have a faster and more direct access to meaning, while words are discussed to require additional translational activity...” -Schlochtermeier, et al. (2013).
Given the importance of images to visitors, it is good to know what constitutes as good images for a website to make the most of creative web design.
When people think of the best web design they typically only think of a site’s layout. However, most people forget that a large portion of layout is where to place high-quality images and content. The best web design is unique for each client and their business. However, there are similarities with site layouts and how images are arranged:
Simple and effective designs use layouts with images that do not confuse visitors, help them navigate the site, sell your unique message, and help convert visitors into a customers. Good layouts also use images to guide visitors toward pertinent pages or locations on their site.
There is a misconception that images need to be small for a website. Images need to be as big as possible to get high resolution, only their file sizes need to be small. Thankfully OCG takes care of all file compression so even if you give us massive photos, we ensure they are optimized on your website. Images that are too small are 'pixelated' or 'low-res' and look bad on websites and can hurt your online appearance and brand identity.
High Res Image
Low Res Image
The images need to be well lit. Avoid using a flash because it tends to wash out all images. The main source of lighting should not be behind the subject either and you should avoid highly contrasted images that add a lot of distracting patterns. This is very important because many images on a website have text over them and high-contrast images make it difficult to read the content and can be strenuous to look at on their own.
Good Lighting
Bad Lighting
Having everything in focus can make the image too cluttered and distract from what you really want to viewer to see in the image. A ‘soft-focus’ pulls the viewer’s eye toward the object you want site visitors to pay attention to while softly blurring the rest. This can also help de-clutter busy images.
Good Focus
Bad Focus
Many people think that if you want to draw attention to something it needs to be centered in the image. That can get repetitive with many images on your site. Take images from close up and far away with the subject in different places. It can be a mistake to take all of your images from one perspective using one composition, unless you are taking product shots.
Good Composition
Bad Composition
You may hear web-designers or account-coordinators talking about ‘mastheads’. Mastheads, banners, or site headers are the images that display at the top of each web page. These images need to be large (to work with a responsive website) and need to be ‘landscape’ not ‘portrait’. Additionally, because visitors only see a tiny part of the whole image, it is a good idea for the image to capture 'depth’. For example, instead of taking images from a top-down angle on a subject, try taking shots from different angles that emphasize perspective. A good way to do this is taking a series of images starting from the ground-level and moving up.
Good Perspective
Bad Perspective
Many clients find sites and ask what we can do to make their site more like the example they choose. The most common site people tend to ask for is Apple or other sites for technology companies. So what do they do that makes their layout work so well?
Last month I conducted an email survey asking one simple question: Given the choice, which of the following is more important for your business website? There were only two possible answers: Your website's design, or search engine rankings. Here are the results:
Although the survey was unscientific, the results show that website owners clearly understand the importance of search engine rankings. With few exceptions, I believe search engine rankings are the most urgent factor contributing to business website success. Simply put, if people can't find you, it really doesn't matter how great your website looks. That's not to say website design isn't important. It's vital. However, it is easy to get wrapped up in design and put everything else on hold. Here, we design around search. By that, I mean literally putting ranking factors above design elements and publishing content around specific search terms. We predict visitor volume based on specific keyword rankings and known search volumes. Our goals for design are to provide an elegant, polished, branded experience for users that is lightening fast on any device. That happens to be Google's goal too, so favor is being given to sites that meet these criteria. In many ways, I think it's time to rethink design. In the old days, the goal was to keep the total weight of a webpage under 100K. Even better, under 65K. As broadband became widespread, that kind of went out the window, although I personally never bought into the idea that a page could be as big as you want. With something like 2/3 of Internet searches being conducted on mobile devices, that 100K limit makes a lot of sense. So, while web design is critical, it is important to keep things in perspective. Rankings and user experience are what drive sales. Design complexity is fun, but frequently stands in the way of other critical goals.
You might be surprised to know that online shopping, known to us now as e-commerce, first emerged at the tail end of the 1970s when inventor Michael Aldrich produced the first known electronic transaction system—a connection between an everyday television and a processing computer. Aldrich went on to develop more sophisticated tools for electronic transactions throughout the 1980s, which began to be adopted by large companies in the United Kingdom. Then in 1991, when Tim Berners Lee made his brainchild, the World Wide Web, available for public and commercial use, the electronic shopping systems that are ubiquitous today—including the shopping cart—began to take shape. IBM, e-Bay, and Amazon were some of the earliest to adopt and turn the technology into their core way of doing business. In the 25 years since then, the basic visual nature of the online shopping experience hasn’t changed much. But with mobile shopping firmly on scene and here to stay, digital storefronts and shopping carts seem to be undergoing a makeover. Here’s what some experts think you can expect to see for e-commerce in 2016: Increasingly standardized layouts This has been a trend in web design in general over the last couple of years, as developers and marketing departments are finding that standardizing their web sites translates into longer visit times and higher conversions. Users like to be comfortable and feel like they’re in familiar territory when they’re shopping. Get too out-of-the-box with your searches, CTAs, shopping carts, or other components of your pipeline and you create friction that can result in a dropped sale. That epiphany has led to standardizing of everything from menu delivery, button placement and design, and overall layouts— saving unique and creative ideas for the marketing campaign. Card-style product views You may have seen these popping up on retail web sites in recent months. Products are displayed in a self-contained, bite-sized card (also called tiles) that contains an image, a short description, the price, and, usually, links to share it on social media. Think: Pinterest. This presentation allows sellers to provide users with an at-a-glance view of the product that’s easy to compare with similar products in a way that’s visually rich but not overwhelming. Examples: https://www.behance.net https://canopy.co Flat, minimal, and vibrant Gone are the days of stylized, three-dimensional, deeply-shadowed objects layered throughout a single web page. We’ve been moving toward flatter design for many years, but the last two have seen a proliferation of these ultra-flat, minimal, image-driven e-commerce website designs. To offset that minimalism, designers are turning to bolder, chunkier typography and exceptional colorful (and sometimes unusual) tones.
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Ah, that thorny space between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we all try to stick to a diet of salad for the next four weeks while we wait for our bank accounts to refill in time to get the last few gifts we forgot about on Black Friday. On tap this week: Best selling books of 2015, SnapChat for business, wrangling your 2016 email marketing plans into a calendar, a look into OpenTable’s dual-design process, and hot business trends. Hottest selling business books of 2015 NEW YORK TIMES
Evergreen business heavy-hitters Malcom Gladwell (Outliers, Tipping Point) and Tony Robbins (Money: Master the Game) are joined by mid-career authors Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Freakonomics, Think Like a Freak), relative newcomer Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit), and others on this list of the best-selling business books of 2015. What the heck is SnapChat, and how do I use it for business? SMALL BUSINESS TRENDS Just a few short years ago, SnapChat was making headlines as a controversial tool for frisky teenagers and adults who wanted a way to send private content to friends without the risks of exploitation—the content disappears as soon as it’s viewed—that come with other social media outlets. Today, businesses from BuzzFeed to Mashable to Comedy Central are using SnapChat to reach a younger audience, with content that lends itself to SnapChat’s ephemeral quality. Build a killer email marketing calendar for 2016 EMAIL EXPERIENCE COUNCIL Newsletters, promotions, launches, events. New customers, current customers, former customers, possible customers. If you’re a businesses with multi-layered email campaigns, things can get overwhelming when you’re planning for the coming year. The Email Experience Council lays it out for you in this handy guide. Too complicated? Let us build a comprehensive email marketing campaign calendar for you. See how restaurant reservations maestro OpenTable designs its mobile experience for both sides of their marketing coin INVISION We love a good behind-the-scenes look at how today’s most innovative companies are handling their web and app design, digital marketing, brand strategy, content creation, and other components of a successful product. Here, OpenTable opens the doors to its design department to give us a look at how they solve the problem of who to design for when two different market segments use the same app. Srirachi2Go Makes Hot Debut AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION Possibly the only instance of a tiny, empty bottle going viral you’ll ever see. Sriracha2Go pleases hardcore chili sauce fans by providing a portable vehicle for their addiction, and the Internet goes wild.
We understand. When your web developer revealed your new website in 2004, it was love at first site. Your employees were excited, your clients were excited, business boomed, and you still look at it with affection every time you pull it up in the morning. It’s a beautiful but is also a slow website. Unfortunately, if it takes more than three seconds to fully load, and many websites with outmoded technology or development standards even just a few years old do, it’s costing you money. Consumers have become conditioned to hyper-fast load times, and are increasingly unwilling to wait more than a few seconds for websites that don’t provide them—an allowance that would have seemed ridiculous ten years ago. But today, 40% of web users say they’ll abandon a website if loading takes more than three seconds. Even more startling: Studies show that a delay of just one second on an e-commerce web site can reduce sales conversion rates by up to 7%. If your web site earns $25,000 per day, that’s a loss of $625,000 every year. Kissmetrics has a rundown of surprising stats on how un-optimized web page load time can effect your business. And isn’t just consumers giving your slow website the snub. Google, in service to demanding consumers, penalizes slow web sites in search rankings. Google’s model revolves around providing useful and easily-accessible information for its users. A slow-loading web site isn’t easily-accessible, and as such, isn’t considered useful. That means all the hard work you’ve put into boosting your SEO rankings could be deeply undermined by even a few seconds of delayed load time. A comprehensive web site with load times that meet modern standards should be at the top of your Internet marketing checklist. You can check your website’s page load times at Pingdom. Not cutting it at the three-second mark? Try these three adjustments to help bring those wait times down and get more visitors to stick around: 1. Optimize your images and videos. These are often the biggest culprit in older web sites. Most photo- and video-editing software has a “save for web," "quick export" or similar options that helps keep file size down. 2. Keep your script and CSS files compressed into a single file. If your Javascript is spread across several files that have to load every time a visitor refreshes your page, or clicks on another page in your website, your load times can plummet while the browser renders all of them. 3. Make smart use of caching. Caching allows the browser to keep certain elements of your website pre-loaded, so that when a visitor loads your page multiple times over a given timeframe, it doesn’t have the render the whole page from scratch each time. If after implementing those changes, your website is still loading too slowly, it’s time for a major tune-up.
Short of Apple and American politics, I can’t think of an industry more consistently skilled at building and riling up a fierce, loyal fan base than sports. Games are exciting by nature, but great sports marketers are experts at capitalizing on that foundation. They know how to make full use of tools like brand strategy, social media, and email and internet marketing, even internal marketing, to make everything about their game, their players, their ticket sales. But those sales boosting strategies aren’t unique to sports, and any business willing to invest in the value of enthusiasm can steal them to power their own home field advantage.
This is something that sports marketers do really well, and it’s an easy play for any business to add to their repertoire. There are many great ways in which the sports industry markets that any business can put towards their list of sales boosting strategies. We all know that social media is about engagement, and that engagement usually means broadcasting and interacting. But how carefully are you listening on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and other social media outlets for positive mentions by existing and potential customers? What do you do when you find them? You amplify them. Like them, but don’t just like them. Respond, but don’t only respond. Retweet, reblog, link to those mentions in your marketing emails, share them through all relevant channels. Enthusiasm is most infectious when it’s observed in an un-coerced third party (just like endorsements—and enthusiasm is a form of endorsement). Sports teams amp up fan excitement by compounding the energy of excited, individual fans, and you can do the same thing for your product or service by letting your potential customers be voyeurs to the happiness of your existing customers. Be sure to listen for other customer and market segment conversations about things relevant to your business, too, and be a conduit for those. Sharing excitement about upcoming events, new technology, and other things your customers are interested in can align you with the shared philosophies and positive feelings that are precursor to buying.
We know what happens in the football huddle: The quarterback pulls the team together mid-game to strategize the next play, congratulate or motivate players, commiserate on a sagging score, or in general to get player buy-in back at peak levels. In other words, it’s a kind of internal marketing. Whatever it is that happens here during any given game, you can be sure the quarterback feels it’s critical to winning that particular game. Not the game they planned for, hoped for, or even expected statistically—the game that’s currently in progress, with all of its unexpected turns. Keep your sales boosting strategies and marketing plans bold and robust but flexible. This way they can be quickly adapted to unexpected changes like economic downturns, new technologies or outlets, poor product reception, social media backlash, or any of the number of fumbles, blocks, and interceptions that can plague a campaign. Internet and email marketing are especially good channels for marketing flexibility. Social media, too. Campaign messages can be quickly adapted to reflect changing information, corrected for mistakes or oversights, take advantage of new developments, or work around a mea culpa situation gracefully.
Have you ever been invited to a luxury box seat for a high-profile sporting event? If so, you know how much that changes the experience of watching a game. That game is, technically speaking, the same game for everyone in the stadium. The lineup is the same, the announcers are the same, the plays are the same, no matter where you’re watching from. But I assure you the game doesn’t feel the same from up there behind those big windows, wine and cheese in hand, as it does in the crowded, sometimes too-hot or too-cold and almost always stiff-seated stands below. The VIP treatment changes—and almost always enhances—the customer experience. Sales boosting strategies that add to a customer's value and experience will increase sales simply due their satisfaction. Levels of purchase have become more commonplace since the advent of web apps and services, and this can work for just about anything—but keep it simple, and make it meaningful. You can shift up or down with this. If your service is basic, what expansions, add-ons, or concierge-like perks can you offer at a higher price point to add value, and boost the customer’s experience (and opinion of your brand)? Even something as simple as extended support hours can boost your customers’ sense of their value to you. If your product is already complex and/or high-dollar, can you provide a pared-down version to offset the image and value of the original? This can also make your brand more accessible to a larger market, but be careful and talk to a brand strategist on this—some brands can be damaged by offering more basic and affordable options (think of a $22,000 MSRP on a Rolls Royce).
Team marketing is a big component of sports marketing, but I’d argue that player marketing is the key to the emotional resonance that gives sports its true power. Players are storied, and as humans we’re helplessly attracted to stories—particularly ancient story archetypes like the hero’s journey, rags-to-riches stories, David and Goliath. Embedded deep down in our DNA is the universal need for something to root for, and it’s why sports and games elicit the responses they do. It’s why a single sports team can affect everything from a fan’s wardrobe (black and orange, anyone?) to their emotional behavior (shouting red-faced at the screen, or the field), to their willingness in some cases to paint themselves and go out into public with large foam appendages attached to their bodies. Burt Shavitz, the now legendary figurehead of Burt’s Bees personal care products, is a favorite go-to example of the power of storytelling in a brand. The quality of his products is top-notch, but it’s his unlikely story—north country recluse living off the land and raising bees stumbles on myriad uses for beeswax—that populates the brand with its infectious personality and wins it fans (and hundreds of millions in revenue) worldwide. If you can capture the fertile seeds of story that served as the seeds for your company’s products and services, or that underlie the company itself or the people in it, marketing magic can happen. Just be sure the story is congruous with the company’s brand image, and is told consistently across all messaging.
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