Web sites text needs to be easy to read
Your visitor should not need a map and compass to navigate a web site
Web sites should be designed, not painted
People need to find web sites easily

Web sites text needs to be easy to read

Select text and background colours very carefully. Certain colours and shades camouflage each other. Font selection needs to come from a narrow collection of ‘system fonts’. These are the fonts already on your computer. They vary between users, although there is a core of about fifteen fonts which are on just about every computer and these are known as system fonts.

Some fonts can be a little tricky to make out. Broadly speaking, serif fonts like Times or Verdana (i.e. with little ‘flicks’ on the ends of the uprights) are easier to read. Dark-coloured fonts against a light background also tend to be easier to read. These are only rules of thumb, our own website being a case in point.

Text size is an issue. Obviously small sizes are difficult to read and large sizes tend to be a bit ‘in your face’. It is not a precise science; every individual user has the ability to set their screen resolution to a range of settings all of which render text differently, but large enough to read easily with headings emphasised slightly either through colour, size or styling (e.g. bold).

People do not, by and large, sit down to read a good website. They go, get information and get out. Bullet points are hateful things in brochures and on PowerPoint, but they are effective on websites. Small paragraphs are good. Chunked up information, made up of self-contained points each making sense on its own or as part of a greater weight of prose, is good – almost modular in structure. Highlighted content allows visitors to do what they are already trying to do i.e. scan the screen, pick up words and phrases that resonate and then read around those phrases.

Your visitor should not need a map and compass to navigate a web site

Your site should have what we call ‘information architecture’. That is a structure that makes sense and can be put in place before you start building. There is an 80 : 20 rule with websites. 80% of what your visitors need to know will be available to then within 20% of the content of your website. The key thing is to make that 20% easy to find.

Your users should set this agenda. What they buy is not necessarily what you think you are selling and why they buy it is usually not a given.

In general terms, make sure that your links are clear. Make sure that your labelling is descriptive and make sure your structure is straightforward.

Buttons or Tabs can be used to highlight certain levels of links, and smaller links can be used for more general stuff.

They say three clicks is the optimum – if it is important then getting there in one click is essential. Secondary information can be a click or two further away.

Web sites should be designed, not painted

Web sites are communication tools. In most instances, a web site works best as a simple platform for displaying information, goods and services. If it tries to be a work of art, science, wonderment or magic it will fail as a communication tool and instead of looking impressive or clever, you will come across as self-indulgent.

Presentation is important and the skills of a creative graphics and interaction designer are essential. A good designer will recognise the imperative and channel their creativity in support of the objectives.

Images can and do say more than words. Typography is an important aspect as it layout, user journey and creating a sticky site that people want to stay on. These are elements of design which are absolutely essential to a website.

In general a consistency of design throughout the site is professional and also maintains the same standards and protocols of hierarchy, navigation, links and presentation.

People need to find web sites easily

Everyone has developed an obsession with Google. Search for something like ‘tee shirts’ in Google will return over 5 million responses. Everyone selling tee shirts wants to be on page one, preferably at position one. Dream on!

You can do it against a more focussed search like tee shirts in nilsville (or wherever you live) and you might get to the top of that search (in fact I suspect that this page will do it against that exact search).

Before you get featured on Google, you need to get on to Google and start reading about how to get up the rankings. We will be publishing one of our free guides on the website in due course.

Web sites should also be promoted offline through the usual marketing channels. The web is usually seen as a great way to access loads of new people from all over the world. Well maybe, but not immediately. At the outset, it is a great way to make a second, third, fourth, etc., sale to existing customers. These are the people who already know you, already like your things and have little resistance. The first ting you should do is write, email, phone, send leaflets and post cards to existing contacts. You should include your web address in your other marketing materials, from letterheads to brochures to TV. While all this is going on, you should put some effort into search engine optimisation. I suggest you do what you can yourself 9through your designer) before going engaging a professional SEO firm.

Website Design is apparently

The graphic design and coding of web pages, full websites and interactive web applications.

It’s a bit like the story of the man in a hot air balloon who descends and hovers above the ground to ask a passer-by where he is. The passer-by thinks for a moment and then tells him he is standing in a basket, strung beneath a hot air balloon, about twenty feet above the centre of a field. All the information is entirely accurate and totally useless.

While the question was open to all sorts of interpretation, the answer was completely obtuse. In web terms a better way of understanding where it all fits in is to couch the questions differently.

What can you do with a website? What can a website do? Why have a website?

All these are better questions.

What can you do with a website?: You can communicate, transact, manage, administer, promote, brand – the list goes on…

What can a website do?: Talk, listen, sell and buy.

Why have a website: Apart from the expectation, you can make everything you do right now more effective through using a good website well.

If e.g. you advertise online or in magazines, then a website can make that more effective. It extends your message beyond the quick hit and into the extended proposition.

If you retail, a website will help you to sell more goods to your existing customers, and allow you to approach them directly with offers rather than waiting for them to come into your shop.

If you have a service there is probably an expectation that you will have a website. Without a product you only have your ‘brand’ to show and people will form opinions about that and you based on it. Certainly it will be the primary source of research for any prospective client. You can organise your key messages in an unambiguous way, present them properly and leave the right impressions and information with the world outside.
Creative Thing is a unique design firm offering a variety of services from basic Website Design to low cost self-managing websites. We can provide complete e-commerce website development through our own sunsidiary company Starteshop from as little as £199. We have created and launched hundreds of successful websites, for many different types of businesses. We have the creative talent of a successful graphics agency, the technical knowldge of advanced web developers, the know how to get your site performing in Search Engines, and the ability to take your business and develop a compelling web proposition to move it forward.

Our website design clients range from small start-up companies to large corporations and everything in between. With our combined experience in graphic design, website development and e-commerce sites, you can be confident that whatever your project demands, our web developers can deliver.

Web users take just 50 milliseconds to like or hate a website.

From an article originally by Michael Hopkin in Nature News

Researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

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Creative Thing are indebted to a contact of ours who told us at a recent meeting that we did not feature in a Google search for web design in Upton upon Severn. Now, achieving a high search engine listing can be complicated and expensive and take a quite some dedication week in – week out. But for a listing against something fairly focused, such as web design in Upton upon Severn, that should be doable without paying someone else to do it.

We actually thought it would be useful if we treated this as a bit of a case study, illustrating how, with some basic techniques, you can get your site performing against a focused search term without paying an SEO agency. By way of a live demo, we thought we would see how long it takes us to get on to a page one list against the search term “web design in Upton Upon Severn”.

Result: It took one hour of work and less than four hours later Creative Thing were placed second on a Google search for ‘web design in Upton upon Severn’.

With search engine optimisation, there is a 80:20 rule. 80% of what makes a difference can be achieved through 20% of all the options and actions open to you. And using these basic techniques alone we wanted to test how high we could rise on Google for web design in Upton Upon Severn.

Key words: Key words are important. In this case the key words ‘web design in Upton upon Severn’ need to appear on the site with a degree of frequency. Of course they will also need to be sewn into the copy in such a way that it reads well and makes sense. It helps if any key words can be used about six times on each relevant page and if they feature on the home page of the site, then so much the better.

Inbound links: Inbound links from other sites are interpreted by Google as a sign that the target site is a valuable reference point. The more important the referring site, the greater Google will reward you. So e.g. if this site was to achieve an inbound link from a national newspaper site, then it would suddenly shoot up the listings under all of its search terms, including web design in Upton Upon Severn. Apparently fifteen to twenty inbound links will make a massive difference to listing levels, the more important the site the better, so keep plugging away at them.

Fresh content: One of the reasons we choose to use a converted blog as a website, is because it offers us the ability to update frequently without having to tweak our designs or revert back to original design files and edit them. We can simply log in and write a new page as if we were writing an email. So we will refresh our content over the coming days with our objective of promoting Creative Thing as the firm for web design in Upton Upon Severn. We could use other systems for this, but the flexibility of a blog and the ability to change the design from time to time without losing the content is a little too attractive to ignore.

Reporting your site to search engines: It never does any harm to go to the sites of Google, Yahoo, Ask and other search engines and fill in the appropriate online forms telling them about your site. You don’t have to do it every day, but certainly once in a while is a good idea. With a blog (such as this site) it benefits from the links it has programmed into it with the blogging engines. These certainly seem to help its listing in the mainstream search engines.

After trying these things for yourself, you might consider, other strategies, such as dropping links on other sites, placing entries onto forums with web links in your auto signature and other such tactics. Beyond those, pay-per-click online advertising has its part. Certainly if you are serious, using a specialist agency such as our SEO partner Vertical Leap will make a significant impact on search engine position and also your ability to maintain that position.

The basic point here is that before you pay for any search engine optimisation work, try these things for yourself and see how well you can do – it is much cheaper and you might be surprised at how 80% of what you need can be achieved through 20% of techniques out there.

Creative Thing have set up a strategic partnership with Vertical Leap the one of the UK’s leading search engine marketing firms.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a niche speciality within the sphere of web design. It is no longer credible to claim expertise in both web design and SEO. The two things require different skill sets and processes. However, the web designers and the SEO team do need to work very closely to develop sites which score highly in searches.

So we put the term “SEO” into a Google search and the firm that came top of the list was Vertical Leap. This made them top of our list of potential partners. Now Creative Thing’s potency through applying genuine design principles to the world of marketing design has been harnessed to, Vertical Leap’s superiority as Search Engine Optimisation experts.

This gives Creative Thing’s customers the best of both worlds. A dedicated design led approach made to maximise usability and branding effect, supported by dedicated search engine marketing effort from a team of SEO experts. (more…)

A little vox-pop exercise:

How many websites have you visited? How many can you remember and visualise right now?

Do you get onto a website, get what you want from it and then get out? Or do you hang around a while and explore it’s content?

Do you like useful websites or nice websites (or perhaps something of both)? Is what you think as nice, also what everyone else thinks as nice?

Do you return to websites? If so is it to get more of the same information or more of the same user experience?

Your answers will probably suggest that you visit a quite a few websites over the course of a week or month, but you do not revisit many websites and you cannot really remember what too many of them were like within about ten minutes. You generally are looking for information or to help you form an opinion about a thing or about an organisation. If you do return to a website, it is because you need to regularly top up on the latest information. You think a website is a reflection of the company behind it. You tend to hate too many whistles and bells getting in the way of finding what you are looking for. Most of your friends and colleagues would agree with you about this.

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