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In a world of ‘Web 2.0’, ‘mash-ups’ and ‘blogs’, designers and clients alike are trying to push the envelope with their sites and designs. That’s a great thing unless you lose your consumers in the process.
What IS Cutting-Edge Web Design?
Admittedly, it is just as ambiguous a term as “web 2.0”, but it does have meaning. I’ve most commonly heard ‘cutting edge’ refer to new technologies that are just emerging into use, but it’s not limited to that. I’d consider some color schemes, design techniques and even new uses for existing products or services to be included. Most importantly, the term is mostly indefinable and totally discretionary.
Who Are You Designing For?
Web designers are getting creative. Really creative. Maybe too creative. Take a look at designer Bryan Veloso’s site, Avalonstar (seriously, go ahead). There are some really nice, “cutting-edge” effects here. Since Bryan describes his site as ‘his playground’, the design is exactly what it should be – whatever he wants. More often than not, however, sites are being built to connect with consumers of some kind and are not just our design ‘playgrounds’. This means that the consumers should, at least at some level, be dictating our sites’ designs .
If the designer’s responsible for AARP.org were to use a similar design, they would absolutely be missing the mark. AARP is an “organization for people age 50 and over.” The youngest a member could possibly be in this organization (born 50 days ago, today) would have been nearly 40 when AOL 3.0 first launched on Windows 95. In addition to being more prone to vision problems that would make lower-contrast sites difficult to read, this demographic as a whole is far less familiar with the internet than most 4 year-olds today.
Providing a cutting-edge website to this demographic doesn’t mean pumping it up with a bucket of Silverlight and 3 cans of ‘web 5.0’… Simply using the internet is cutting-edge to some consumers. Keeping your consumers’ aptitudes in mind will help you keep their viewership.
The social media bookmarklet has become a de-facto element in most new website designs. And while I love social media and think it can have some huge benefits for websites; I think including social bookmarklets like AddThis to a new web build default is at best lazy-ness and at worse symptomatic of a complete miss-understanding of how social media works.
So after I went off on a bit of rant about them in the office I thought I needed an experiment to prove my point.
I chose the bookmarklet tool from AddThis and using Yahoo Site Explorer I found some websites using the tool.
To get a random selection of websites I chose the website ranked 1, 101, 201 etc on SiteExplorer all the way to 1001. The idea was for the websites to be of mixed quality, as it would have been too easy to choose rubbish websites and try and make my case with those sites.
For each of these sites using the book mark tool I tested there presence on Digg & Delicious to see if to some extent the bookmarklets were working, then finally on stumbleupon (which isn’t included on addthis bookmarklet by default) to ascertain whether the sites in question would have gained their votes without the bookmarklet.
Last week, Tim O'Reilly posted about self-linking as a journalistic practice, where one article on the Web refers to another story at the same site instead of an external link. For example, at BusinessWeek.com, a new feature article may link phrases and terms to other articles at Business Week for more explanation.
O'Reilly calls this a taxing proposition - he's saying the benefit of the Web is that it's an amalgamation of ideas, and that weak self-referential links at these sites can degrade the Web if they are just trying to generate traffic, and avoid links with more robust information.
I happen to disagree with the sentiment. I'm not sure about the motivations behind the self-linking, whether they are purely to increase traffic, but I liken those links to how a magazine refers to previous stories for more enlightenment on the topic. Yes, it is good for business, and maybe even insular, but if an article sends you to a previous story on a topic for more explanation, they are also saying that they believe their explanation is more worthwhile and keeps you at the site. In journalism, an external link says: the other guys are doing this better than we are, trust them and not us.
Whether the incentive behind building one’s website is business related or personal, it is important that one’s website must look professional in its design. Along with a beautiful and professional design a website must be very interactive and structural. When designing a website one wants to keep the user in mind. One wants their content to be easily viewable and easily accessible. In short one’s website should be user friendly. In order to make the website user friendly some key principles must be used. These principles include fast loading time, browser compatibility, organization, and the design should be related to the content to a certain extent.
To create a fast loading time it is a very good idea to create a clean and basic HTML page while flash is nice it takes a long time to load and can get very messy at times. A another great idea is to not use too many high resolution graphics try to keep the page clean and simple. Overuse of graphics and effects will cause the website to load much slower than it needs to. A fast loading time goes hand in hand with organization. If one organizes the website nicely then one will be able to create a clean and simple layout that loads quickly. The organization of one’s website determines how long a visitor or user will stay on the website. The user is more likely to read the content on the website if it is well organized. The clean layout design is a a design that actively uses the white space to enhance a website’s appeal. Try focusing on the content of the site, and use fonts that are available on most or all computers. By concentrating on the content of the website it makes things a lot easier for the visitors or users which in turn creates traffic for the website and this causes the website to gain popularity. The golden key to a good web design is one that is professional, content based, and easily accessible.
I've been fighting this sinking feeling that we're headed for another four years (or eight) of a Republican President. Not that I have anything against John McCain except that I'll never vote for him. But I'm a pretty staunch Democrat, and it'd be nice to blame my own party for the world's problems for a change.
In the last presidential election, I formulated a theory that the most social media-savvy party would win. John Kerry and the DNC pretty much screwed the pooch every chance they got. Bush, on the other hand, had some remarkably media-savvy folks doing everything from real-time blogging and spin of debates to carrying their Swift Boat campaign to YouTube.
Kerry, of course, went on to lose by 3 million popular votes and a lot more states.
Could John Kerry have reached another 3 million people online? Dunno. But surely a few smart moves online could've helped when his image started to crumble.
Fast forward. It's 2008. The Democratic National Convention is going on now, and the Republicans start theirs in a week or so. So I decided to compare their respective convention sites based on simple stuff.
I may just have to change my party affiliation.
Recently in several SEO forums I noticed a number of threads discussing ways to find and build "economical" links. The forum participants wanted to know how they could initiate "safe" reciprocal linking as well as "fast" submissions to free article directories. They reasoned these tactics were worth doing because both linking methods were "economical" and "easy" to use.
I understand some linking techniques can be expensive, tedious to implement and extremely time consuming, but tying your online business success to linking tactics deemed "easy", "fast" and "cheap" seems counter-productive. If you limit your linking to low-cost tactics or look at the practice as "link building" instead of "marketing for links" you're almost guaranteed to fail.
When I attended South by Southwest 2008, I had the pleasure of attending a panel where four somewhat lost panelists were (with difficulty) trying to come up with metrics to measure success from a social media marketing campaign. I was a little annoyed when they concluded that there were no metrics available right now, and that someone would have to come up with a new way of measuring social media success.
While many people argue that the current metrics are no longer applicable, here's a look at how we can adapt the currently available methodologies and apply them to social media marketing campaigns.
Submissions and shares
On a very basic level, every time someone submits or shares content from your site to a social site (regardless of how well that submission does) you build a submission history for your site and you also get a link back. Since many of these social sites have substantial PageRank, even moderately successful shares aren't a complete loss (even if they aren't promoted). Furthermore, it is also good to keep in mind that someone thought enough of your content to share it with another large community.
One thing to watch out for, however, is submitting any and all content from your site, regardless of quality, just for links. I've seen several startups do this and it's important to point out that if you think you're getting away with it, odds are 90% of the time you're not. This will get you the scorn of the community and probably banned.
