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Casual Articles - Less Is More - How to Keep Your Website Clutter-free
Joe Nogood owns a small but thriving gift store. He is middle-aged and he dabbles in the stock market and has survived some major crashes in his time. He is an expert on gifts, having learned the skills over the years. There is only one word to describe him, ordinary.Joe has been studying the internet for months, surveying the battlefield, as he calls it. One day, he declared to Stan, his longtime buddy. "The dotcom bubble has bottomed out, I see that we are at the beginning of a new uptrend. Let’s build an online st
The Internet is clearly a different form of communication to more established media such as printed literature. However, it is only in recent years that its intrinsic differences have begun to make an impact on web design. I cannot count the number of times I've heard of clients asking their web designe
Speaking is selling. It' an effective marketing strategy because it showcases your knowledge and expertise to many people at once. People will remember you and will think you're successful. It gives you higher visibility and credibility which will increase over time.But you already know that. Now you want more. You want to know HOW to get started. It' actually quite easy to promote your service-based business by public speaking.To help get you started, I'll share with you the steps I took that got
The past was about 'bells and whistles'. Websites were designed to showcase the technology behind the web rather than to be an effective communications medium. Flash was used to "excite" and "engage" - its effect however was often the opposite. And web navigation was sometimes an experiment in obscurity making it almost impossible for the visitor to find their way around. Entertainment was the mantra rather than communication effectiveness.
We want it now
There are often only a handful of reasons or actions for which the majority of visitors will be at your site. They want to complete the task in hand e.g find a price, book a ticket or get directions with minimum fuss.
Unless a site is quick and easy to use it will be a barrier rather than a gateway. Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, suggests users spend on average less than 2 minutes on a website. The key to engaging visitors' must therefore be simplicity over complexity; the need is less not more - less clutter, less blurb and fewer barriers.
Why clutter-free design
"When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click…
…We're thinking 'great literature' (or at least 'product brochure'), while the user's reality is much closer to "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour." --Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think
The Internet is clearly a different form of communication to more established media such as printed literature. However, it is only in recent years that its intrinsic differences have begun to make an impact on web design. I cannot count the number of times I've heard of clients asking their web designe
Websites generate sales. That's the whole reason they exist for many people. And mailing lists also generate sales. Targeted mailing lists, especially, are valuable; the audience they are directed at have been identified as interested in a niche item, and are likely to have a higher per-piece sale ratio than an audience on a list generated from the phone book.Did you know you could leverage the power of the targeted mailing list for your website sales? It's not spam; you will be asking people to express interest in y
We want it now
There are often only a handful of reasons or actions for which the majority of visitors will be at your site. They want to complete the task in hand e.g find a price, book a ticket or get directions with minimum fuss.
Unless a site is quick and easy to use it will be a barrier rather than a gateway. Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, suggests users spend on average less than 2 minutes on a website. The key to engaging visitors' must therefore be simplicity over complexity; the need is less not more - less clutter, less blurb and fewer barriers.
Why clutter-free design
"When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click…
…We're thinking 'great literature' (or at least 'product brochure'), while the user's reality is much closer to "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour." --Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think
The Internet is clearly a different form of communication to more established media such as printed literature. However, it is only in recent years that its intrinsic differences have begun to make an impact on web design. I cannot count the number of times I've heard of clients asking their web designe
A growing number of online entrepreneurs are finding success with article directory submission services. Website operators, business owners and internet traffic specialists have found article marketing to be a valuable tool in their success.If you’ve ever read an article on a website and noticed a brief paragraph, located at the bottom of the article, detailing the author’s name and website, then you have already experienced the success of an article directory. An entrepreneur prepares an article, which is centered
Why clutter-free design
"When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click…
…We're thinking 'great literature' (or at least 'product brochure'), while the user's reality is much closer to "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour." --Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think
The Internet is clearly a different form of communication to more established media such as printed literature. However, it is only in recent years that its intrinsic differences have begun to make an impact on web design. I cannot count the number of times I've heard of clients asking their web designe
Copywriting is basically the term used in referring to the process of writing the text that publicize a business, person, an idea or an opinion. A copy may be used on its own, such as a script for a television or radio advertisement, or in conjunction with other kinds of media as in the text for websites and promotional materials. The main purpose of copywriting is to create text that would persuade an audience to act by patronizing a particular product, service or viewpoint. Copywriting may also be used to sway an audience
…We're thinking 'great literature' (or at least 'product brochure'), while the user's reality is much closer to "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour." --Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think
The Internet is clearly a different form of communication to more established media such as printed literature. However, it is only in recent years that its intrinsic differences have begun to make an impact on web design. I cannot count the number of times I've heard of clients asking their web designe
The Importance of ConsistencyAs you are building your online business, focus on consistency. Which would you rather, a site that makes a once a week sale of $70 or that makes a sale a day for $10? I would much prefer the once a day sale. Why? Because it is consistency. When I have consistency, I can grow. I can make adjustments, I can track what works and what does not.Focus on making $10 a day, if you are starting from scratch. Then make the necessary adjustments to get that to $20 a day, then $50 a d
The Internet is clearly a different form of communication to more established media such as printed literature. However, it is only in recent years that its intrinsic differences have begun to make an impact on web design. I cannot count the number of times I've heard of clients asking their web designer to 'put our brochure online' - a brief that reflects a common lack of appreciation of the web as a powerful but very different medium.
Ensuring that the design and layout of our web pages suit the medium they are used in will help to ensure a positive user experience.
Let's look at a few practical ways of doing more with less to make things simpler for our visitors:
1) Make pages easy to scan
It's a well recognised fact now amongst web professionals that people rarely read pages online - they scan, or "speed read". Therefore, if the information they need is not readily available they will move on - and quickly. Sensible use of headings, subheadings and bullet-points help bring a logical hierarchy to the page and allow visitors eyes to scan through the page efficiently to find the information they needallows visitors eyes to scan through efficiently to find the information they need.
2) Give me some [white] space
Subtle and thoughtful use of space in page design helps guide a visitor's eyes to important information. It also helps to bring logical definition to different areas of a page, which lightens the load on our brains and allows us to focus on the task in hand.
3) Copy? Reduce it
Visitors often won't have the time or inclination to read pages and pages of text in the hope of finding what they're after. We need to prune our web copy to suit the medium - get rid of paragraphs
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