What Would Be Your Ideal Testimony?

…and what are you doing to get it?

A little thought exercise

It might sound daft, but it really is worth investing a little thought into this simple question.

Imagine what your next customer might write about your company for their testimony. What precisely would they list as the qualities of your company? What did you do right and what did you do wrong? What impression do you think you made on them?

Having spent a minute or two thinking about that, and listing the good points they’d come up with, ask yourself this: Is that good enough?

Write Yourself A Testimony

Now try writing a testimonial as if you were a customer that says exactly what you want. Perhaps:

The service I received was fantastic, far superior to other companies in the area, and I felt looked after as a customer from day one.

Think about your testimonial and ask yourself if a customer would honestly say what you have written down. If not, why not? Identify the weaknesses that are barring your company from getting the kind of testimonies you want to receive and work out how you can improve those areas.

Be Critical, Be Honest

You have to be ruthless and truly honest with yourself here. Don’t hold any punches. If there’s any weakness in your company — and there are, no business is perfect — then you need to find those weaknesses and deal with them.

Constructive criticism is the cornerstone of growth, so ensure you are honest in your analysis and you will ensure your business can flourish.

Make It Happen

Once you’ve got your criticisms down on paper, work out how to fix them and do it. Don’t think you’ll get around to it at some point in the future. Make those changes before the next customer writes a testimony. Start tomorrow. Start today. Start right now if possible, otherwise you’ll never do it.

Repeat

This process has to be an ongoing one if you want to keep ahead in business. Working out how to make every customer a delighted customer is the best way to ensure your business grows. Delighted customers keep coming back, and they tell people about your company and the wonderful things you’ve done for them. Unhappy customers can destroy a company, so should be avoided at all costs.

For every customer, work out your perfect testimony and go about making it happen.

So You Want To Be The Next Facebook?

Becoming the next Facebook isn’t an easy task, yet everyone seems to be aspiring to it. People see it like winning the lottery or find out that you’re the only surviving yet distant relation to a billionaire oil tycoon who’s just pegged it and left their worldly possessions to you.

Let’s analyse what it is you want and see if we can get you closer to achieving that goal.

1. Delete your Facebook account

What?

That’s right. Delete it. If you don’t delete it you’re going to log into it, aren’t you? In fact you probably already spend a ridiculous amount of time on there. Stop it! Log off and do something productive. While you’re on there you’re not going to be creating the next Facebook.

2. Stop Reading Blogs Titled “How To Become The Next Facebook”, etc

Oh except for this one. Obviously. Read this one all the way through. (Phew, got out of that one!)

Those blogs that claim to be able to tell you how to become the next Facebook don’t know what they’re talking about. How do I know this? Because THEY aren’t the next Facebook. If they knew so much about it, they’d BE it. All they will tell you to do is go to Facebook and share links to your existing website, or Tweet about it, or share it on LinkedIn, or digg it, etc. All that’s going to do is suck up your time and prevent you from creating the next Facebook.

This blog isn’t going to give you 10 sure-fire ways to make your website into Facebook. This blog is going to present the harsh reality of what it MEANS to try and become the next Facebook, so keep reading.

3. How Badly Do You Want To Be The Next Facebook?

Consider this question carefully before answering. Facebook bled money for 5 straight years, from 2004 to 2009, before it started turning a profit. At the time of writing Facebook’s been live for 8 years and has only been profitable for 3 years.

To create a behemoth such as Facebook takes a lot of time and energy, and would likely make you very famous. Can you handle that? I think it’s more likely you just want to run a successful business, not create the next Zeitgeist.

4. Act Now, Act FAST

Don’t succumb to analysis paralysis: If you spend too long fretting over the name, the logo, the colour etc then you’re never going to build the next Facebook.

5. Gamble Everything You Have Now

It could pay off brilliantly and you could end up rolling in cash. Or you might lose everything. Either way you’re not going to get far without taking the gamble.

6. Forget About Cloning Facebook

Or Twitter. Or Pinterest. Or Tumblr. Or Digg. Or anything else out there. Or any combination of them, before you even go there. A clone isn’t going to be the next anything, what you need to do is to create something truly original.

7. Avoid Writing Content

I speak from experience: Writing good quality content takes A LOT of time. What you want is for people to bring content to you. When was the last time you saw something written BY Facebook? Or BY Twitter? Or BY Pinterest. These companies aren’t out there writing content for their websites, they’re providing a platform for people to bring content to them. That’s what your website should do.

8. Innovate

And now the sucker punch: If you want to create the next Facebook then you’re going to have to come up with something truly innovative and unique. You need to do something that nobody’s done before. Or find a much better way to do something that people already do.

I know it’s no fun to hear that, but it’s the sad truth. Anyone who tells you that your website can be the next Facebook is probably trying to sell you snake oil. Don’t trust them. You’re probably better off starting by aiming lower: Try to become the next local independent chain in your area. Try to become the next highly successful restaurant in a 20 mile radius. You get the idea.

Related posts:

1. Minimalism in Web Design
2. AIDA Marketing Model: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action
3. The Advantages of a Single Page Website

I read an interesting article today over at The Next Web regarding an article in the Guardian by one John Naughton, entitled “Graphic designers are ruining the web”.

Is Graphic Design Ruining The Web?

No. And here are 3 reasons why.

1. Graphic design is not about the web

Web design is about taking elements to be presented to a viewer over the web, and arranging them in an aesthetically pleasing way. The elements that may be presented could include text, colours, graphics, videos or anything else that can be transmitted over the web.

To state that graphics are bad would be a huge over-generalization, but this appears to be the crux of Naughton’s argument. Imagine trying to convey in words the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel ceiling. There’s no substitute for an image. A graphic can convey meaning that words cannot.

A graphic designer may create graphics, but it is up to web designers whether to use them, how to use them, and ensuring that they are suitable for transmission in a medium such as the web.

2. The Internet is getting faster

All the time the Internet keeps getting faster and faster.

Just as Moore’s Law states that CPU speeds will double every two years, Nielsen’s Law states that bandwidth available to high-end network users will increase by 50% per year. That gives us a good approximation of the increase in speeds on the Internet year on year.

And just as Moore’s law has The Great Moore’s Law Compensator, “Wirth’s Law” — in which bloat in software increases faster than the improvements in CPU speeds, thus negating the benefits the law should bring — Nielsen’s law too has a similar compensator that doesn’t seem to have been named yet: Websites bloat at the same rate, if not faster, than Nielsen’s Law. Why? Because as the Internet gets faster and faster it becomes less of an issue to make a page that loads quickly, so websites take on more bloat.

A slight aside…

Back in the 90s we were told that a page had to load in under 20 seconds. Any longer than that and the user would give up and go elsewhere. 20 seconds. At the time it seemed like a challenge to manage that, but now you’d laugh in the face of anyone who says their page takes no more than 20 seconds to load. For years and years the figure came down: 20 seconds, 15, 10 until eventually it was down to 2. These days we generally aim to have the content on the screen in under a second, even if some stuff continues to load in the background.

But consider what is happening in the background nowadays: CSS files, JavaScript files, fonts, images, flash animations, videos, … getting all of that in under a few seconds is impressive. But everyone’s happy with the 2 second rule, so few people bother to try to make their pages load any faster than that. Consequently images are getting bigger, CSS files aren’t getting combined, JavaScripts aren’t combined, images aren’t built into CSS sprites, …

So back to the original question: Are graphic designers at fault here? No. These are the faults of the web developer, not the graphic designer.

3. Content is king

Back in the 90s there seemed to be a strange idea that a website was there to look pretty and to, well… that was about it. It seemed to be about having flashy things, scrolly things, swishy whooshy things, annoying animations and stupid graphics that chased your mouse pointer around the screen in a dizzying spiral of distraction from the fact that there wasn’t any real content to read. I’m generalizing, but it’s a valid point.

Enter the 2000s and suddenly “blog” is the buzz-word. People in their 60s to whom the Internet was a strange and mysterious land frequented by the teenagers were suddenly of the opinion they should have a blog, because someone on TV said you need one for your business, and even a novice can make good money working from home by writing a blog.

And what did that mean? Content. Content, content, CONTENT!

The Internet is a very content-driven system nowadays, more so than it ever has been, and with that comes more data. Gone are the days where a website had one page that had a bit about the company, one page that had a bit about the staff, and another page with contact details. Now everyone’s out there writing and publishing, it’s an exciting time for anyone with an interest in writing because everyone’s doing it now. Some do it better than others, but everyone’s out there pushing out original content and sharing the content they’ve found.

But more content means bigger pages. And that is the “fault” (it’s not really a fault) of the authors. Not graphic designers.

Executive summary

1. Web designers are responsible for what goes onto a website, not graphic designers.
2. Web developers are responsible for optimizing websites, not graphic designers.
3. More content means more data, which has nothing to do with graphic designers.

I hope that was concise enough for John Naughton’s tastes.

Related posts:

1. 19 WordPress Plugins NO WordPress Site Should Be Without

19 Awesome WordPress Plugins To Supercharge Your Blog

WordPress is a great piece of software. As a blogging and lightweight CMS it’s brilliant, but with just a few simple plugins it can be extended into a truly amazing platform. These are the 19 plugins I think no site should be without.

19. WordPress SEO

WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, this was true when I wrote my original WordPress SEO article in 2008 and it’s still true today, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! … WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.

Get this plugin

Everyone and their dog knows about this plugin these days, but this list would be incomplete without it! A fantastic plugin to help you work on the SEO of each page of your website or blog, helping make sure you’ve got your keywords into the relevant parts of the page. It’s not the be-all and end-all of SEO, don’t make the mistake of thinking it magically makes your site an SEO goldmine; It doesn’t. But definitely a good starting point.

18. MediaRSS

MediaRSS is a way of embedding media into your feeds. The specification at http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ provides for many kinds of media: audio, video, etc. This plugin is equipped to locate img tags in your posts and generate XML code that can be used by feed readers.

Get this plugin

No configuration or fuss, just sits in the background and does what it says on the tin.

17. Permalink Editor

This plugin adds two areas of functionality: Global page, category or tag permalink structures and individual custom permalinks.

Get this plugin

I use this mainly for the “Permalink Alias” feature it provides, which allows me to specify a short permalink for a page (e.g. /best-plugin) that works alongside the longer permalink I’ve specified in WordPress SEO (e.g. /blog/the-best-wordpress-plugin-in-the-world). It doesn’t play especially nicely with WordPress SEO from Yoast as they both allow you to modify the permalink for the page, but if you click the “Edit” button rather than clicking the permalink itself then you shouldn’t have too many problems. If Yoast adds a permalink alias feature to WordPress SEO then I’ll stop using this plugin, but until that day, this one will remain on my list of awesome plugins.

16. Dublin Core for WordPress

Adds the following Dublin Core metadata elements to posts and pages:

Site name as DC.publisher
Site URL as DC.publisher.url
Post title as DC.title
Permalink as DC.identifier…

Get this plugin

Dublin Core is a standard set of metadata elements for websites that is great for SEO. Just ask WooRank, who mark websites down for not being Dublin Core enabled.

15 More Amazing WordPress Plugins

15. Highlight Search Terms

Highlights search terms using jQuery when referer is a Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Bing, Ask, Baidu and Youdao search engine or within WordPress generated search results. This plugin is a light weight, low resource demanding and very simple &hellip

Get this plugin

Nice simple plugin for highlighting search phrases that people used when coming into your site from Google or other search engines. It even works with your site’s internal search engine. You will need to write some CSS to specify how to highlight text, so use it with PC Custom CSS.

14. PC Custom CSS

This plugin enables you to use any custom CSS code with any theme.

Get this plugin

Adds a “Custom CSS” link under the “Appearance” menu that lets you dynamically add new CSS to your site without editing the theme. Plain and simple, just the way I like it.

13. MyGeoPosition.com Geotagging: Geotags / GeoMetatags / GeoFeedtags / GeoMicroformats / Maps

Create geo-posttags, geo-metatags, geo-feedtags, geo-microformats and maps for posts and pages. Display the geotagged location in form of a map before, after or within the post. An easy-to-use geopicker map with search, drag & drop and optional auto-locating functionality helps entering locations.

Get this plugin

Quite a title, huh? Rolls off the tongue. Despite the awful name, this is a fantastic plugin. It allows you to create maps and all sorts, but I use it mainly for the geotagging features which is good for SEO.

12. Enable Media Replace

This plugin allows you to replace a file in your media library by uploading a new file in its place. No more deleting, renaming and re-uploading files!

Get this plugin

A god-send for when you need to replace images. Sooner or later you’re going to need to replace an image on your website with another and, out of the box, WordPress makes this a hellish task. Enable Media Replace adds in a piece of functionality that should exist in the base build of WordPress: The ability to overwrite an existing image on the site with a different image.

11. Recent comments widget with excerpts

This plugin creates a widget similar to the default recent comments widget. Instead of the format “username on post title,” the widget will display “username said comment excerpt.”

Get this plugin

Great for helping keep your blog fresh. A comment on any post will freshen any other page on your site, making your site truly dynamic and thus great for SEO. This plugin differs to the default comments widget shipped with WordPress in that it adds excerpts of the comment to the page too.

My Top 10 Favourite Plugins for WordPress

10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include: An advanced and versatile algorithm, Templating, Caching, Related posts in RSS feeds, Disallowing certain tags or categories, Related posts and pages.

Get this plugin

Places a list of related posts onto your blog entries, and doesn’t require interfering with your theme. It could do with some more configuration options (being able to hide relevancy would be nice) but otherwise is probably the best option out there.

9. 404 Redirected

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Get this plugin

A few months after putting this site live it had grown from one page to about 10, and I wished to move them around, rename some for SEO purposes, add more, and implement a blog (this blog, to be precise). After doing so the entire site structure had changed and I dropped almost completely out of Google for about 2 weeks.

The problem, Webmaster Tools was telling me, was that I had a large number of 404s on the website from where it had tried to index the old pages so I thought I would create links to the new pages to appease the Google beast. Turns out though that there is a nifty free plugin that will do it for you: 404 Redirected.

This is by far one of my favourite plugins for WordPress and I suggest it should be installed without a second thought on any and all WordPress websites immediately after installing WordPress itself!

8. Category Posts Widget

Category Posts Widget is a light widget designed to do one thing and do it well: display the most recent posts from a certain category.

Get this plugin

This is a lovely simple little widget that does its job really well. As the name suggests it shows posts from a specific category in a widget. I use this for showing featured content, as I covered in my Howto: “Featured Posts” Widget In WordPress post.

7. Fast Secure Contact Form

This plugin allows a webmaster to easily create and add contact forms to WordPress. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin, and also send a meeting request to talk over phone or video. An administration panel is present, where the webmaster can create and preview unlimited forms.

Get this plugin

Want to allow your visitors to contact you directly from the website? Don’t want to have to sign up for an account on another website to do so? Don’t want spam? Just use this then, it does everything you could need it to and more. A brilliant plugin.

6. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Get this plugin

This is another piece of functionality that I feel WordPress should have straight out of the box. This is the best of the XML Sitemap plugins I’ve looked at. In case you don’t know what an XML Sitemap it, it’s a file read by the likes of Google to tell them what pages exist on your website. Search engines use this information to discover content on your site more easily.

The Top 5 Plugins

5. Raw HTML Capability

Lets you disable automatic formatting like smart quotes and automatic paragraphs, and use raw HTML/JS/CSS code in your posts without WordPress messing it up.

Get this plugin

WordPress has a feature that is both useful and annoying: Automatic paragraphs. In my opinion, when I use the HTML editor, I should be allowed to write HTML without the software interfering with it. WordPress thinks otherwise; It is the opinion of WordPress that it should take care of all of my paragraphing needs.

Wrong!

It can be useful when writing a blog entry, such as this one, to not have to worry about the paragraph tags—just pressing twice instead—but for pages where you want to embed any kind of HTML it can wreak havoc. Really they should have three editors: Visual, HTML-lite, and HTML. In HTML you control everything. In HTML-lite WordPress controls some stuff. And in Visual WordPress does it all.

This plugin allows you to selectively disable this ridiculous paragraphing feature. Again, no install of WordPress should be without it.

4. Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings→Media) after previously uploading images or have changed to a theme with different featured post image dimensions.

Get this plugin

Everyone has to resize images on their site at some point. In the words of Tyler Durden, “Nothing’s static, everything’s evolving…”. It’s only when you add an image to WordPress that it creates the different sizes of image, so if you need a different thumbnail size in the future then you’ve got a problem.

When I changed the size of my posts’ thumbnail images recently I needed to recreate all of the thumbnails. That’s where this nifty little plugin comes in. Dead easy to use, start it running and wait while it works its magic. It even has a nice progress bar to tell you how it’s getting on.

3. Search Meter

If you have a Search box on your blog, Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for—and whether they are finding what they are looking for. Search Meter’s admin interface shows you what people have been searching for in the last couple of days, and in the last week or month. It also shows you which searches have been unsuccessful. If people search your blog and get no results, they’ll probably go elsewhere. With Search Meter, you’ll be able to find out what people are searching for, and give them what they want by creating new posts on those topics.

Get this plugin

Great for monitoring searches on your site and reporting them back. I use the popular searches feature to create links to search phrases to help Google find plenty of links to my content.

2. …and Search Fixer

Search Fixer makes “pretty” search links work properly. A pretty search link usually looks like this: http://example.com/search/waldo Because of a bug in WordPress, pretty search links with spaces in them do not work. Search Fixer fixes that bug.

Get this plugin

This is needed if using the “Popular Searches” widget of the Search Meter plugin. Without it the links in the widget won’t work due to a bug in the WordPress core code. Once that bug is fixed this plugin won’t be necessary any more.

1. Ultimate Security Checker

#1 SECURITY PLUGIN for WordPress! We’re the only plugin that gets updated regularly to protect against the latest threats! Why trust your work to a plugin which hasn’t been updated in months or years?

Get this plugin

Essential stuff after installing WordPress. Check your security and fix any serious issues.

Others…?

These are my top 19. I did think about a twentieth to round it off, but I didn’t come up with anything… What would you add to the list? Comment below!

Related posts:

1. Howto: “Featured Posts” Widget In WordPress
2. Attack of the SCREEN INVADERS!!
3. Overchoice, Choice Paralysis and The Paradox of Too many Options

Stop The Spread of Screen Invaders:
Arm yourself With Knowledge

“What Do YOU Want To See On This Website?”

A blog I visited the other day (I forget which) popped up a rectangle at the bottom right hand corner of the page, partially obscuring what I was reading, with the message “What would YOU most like to see on this blog?” and a text box for me to write my answer in. They’d made the feedback process easy so I figured “ah, go on then,” and typed in the message “the bottom right-hand corner of this page”.

Sarcasm? CHECK!

Point well made? CHECK!

The problem is that screen invaders seem to be becoming more and more common and nobody seems in any hurry to take a stand against them. In this article I look at some of the most annoying widgets that people are choosing to put on their websites, and what we can do to fight back and reclaim our precious monitor real-estate!

Live Online Support

Another increasingly common screen invader is the serious infestation of live online support widgets appearing on websites these days. Done right these can be incredibly helpful: The websites that get it right put a prominent link somewhere in the page layout that says “Live support”. When clicked, it pops out a box and you can start chatting. Everyone is happy and the world carries on spinning.

But what really drives me to distraction is when these live support widgets open up on page load and obscure the page content I am trying to read.

The other day I was on a web hosting website and two of these bloody screen invaders popped up, covering the entire article! Marvellous! Now it’s two clicks to read the page I came to the site for in the first place. Perhaps I should have initiated conversations on both to ask what the content of the page was.

But then that was the real kicker: Live support wasn’t even online. These two popups were not only stealing my screen space, but they were doing it for no reason at all!

Would You Be Interested In Taking A Quick Survey?

How many times has your browsing been interrupted by that red-mist inducing phrase? When I go to the library (yeah, ok, it’s been about 15 years, but still) I don’t expect someone to slam their hand onto the page I’m reading and demand to know whether I’m finding the current book helpful or not. Nor do I expect the abstract equivalent when I go to a website.

If you want me to consider taking your survey then put it in the sidebar with an incentive. Give me 10% off my shopping, or a free subscription. Whatever, just make it worth my while. If you interrupt what I’m doing to ask me whether I’m enjoying doing it, the answer isn’t going to be very positive, so stop doing it.

It’s not just surveys either. Widgets such as Fancy Box (which is awesome when used properly) are being abused left right and centre just because someone somewhere saw it once and thought it was so cool that they had to have it on their website. So what do they do? They put content that belongs on the page into it. I’m looking at you WooRank.

“Add This” Widget: Most Annoying Widget In The World?

But finally, on to possibly the most irritating widget ever created: “Add This”. One of the most useful websites on the Internet for a designer, PerBang.dk, uses addthis.com’s “Add This” widget and every day I curse them for it.

Am I being too harsh in calling it “possibly the most irritating widget ever created”?

I don’t think so. It really stands out in my mind as one of the most annoying widgets anyone could willingly choose to place on a web page. Spammers could probably come up with something more irritating still and use cross-site scripting or similar attacks to inject it onto other people’s websites for them, but what amazes me is that people opt to use the “Add This” widget.

The problem with this widget is that it pops out, going from 177x16px to 260×186 without my interaction; A slight brush over it on the way to another page element is enough to send this seemingly innocuous link into a cascade of unwanted crud that generally ends up in the way of whatever I was trying to get to.

In the case of the Perbang website, the widget is placed on the path from the address bar to the colour code box, the single most important element on the page. And every day I find myself swearing at the “Add This” widget because it invariably pops out, obscuring the very box I was trying to get to. It’s poor user experience design and it’s a mistake that should not be occurring on a medium as mature as the World Wide Web!

Does this infuriating persistence make me want to share the website with friends? No.

Does it make me want to have anything to do with “Add This”? No.

So here’s a really simple idea to stop the “Add This” widget from driving all of us insane: Make it so that it only opens IF I CLICK ON IT. I’ll decide if/when I want it to pop out, in the meantime it can sit on the page quietly doing nothing. Like pretty much ever single other non-spam page element in the world.

In actual fact I’m so annoyed by it that I’m even tempted to create a Chrome plugin to remove the wretched thing from pages. Maybe the presence of a plugin to rid the Internet of this irritating little screen invader will be enough to prompt them to re-think their user interface design.

Maybe.

Related posts:

1. Overchoice, Choice Paralysis and The Paradox of Too many Options
2. UI Theory | User Interface Theory and Web Design
3. AIDA Marketing Model: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action

Featured Posts In Sidebar In WordPress

I recently decided to add a “Featured Posts” widget to the sidebar of my blog. My original assumption was that WordPress would have something that could do that from the outset, but I was surprised to find it doesn’t.

But then I was sure there’d be a plugin that could do it. There are, but I was disappointed by every single one of them: Some didn’t install. Some installed and then did nothing. Others installed but didn’t provide a widget, assuming you’d want your featured posts embedded somewhere in your template.

In the end I gave up and thought about the problem laterally until I came up with the following solution: Rather than finding a plugin that tried to do everything for me, I figured I could just use a plugin that shows posts from a category. That way, all I need do to “feature” a post is put it into the relevant category.

Category Posts Widget

There had to be a plugin that could show posts from a specific category in the sidebar. There was, and it was called Category Posts Widget. Simply install this and your WordPress installation will gain a new widget as shown in the screenshot to the right.

As with any widget, drag it into the sidebar area on the right, and then click the arrow to configure it.

But before you configure the widget, first create a new category named, say, “Featured” and add any posts you want to feature into it. This is most easily done by going to Posts > Categories in the menu.

Once you have your new category add the widget to the sidebar and configure it to use the new “featured” category and you’re away. Feel free to change the title of the section as it appears in the sidebar, how many items to show from the category, etc. This widget is quite powerful in that you can choose how to order the articles: Chronologically, randomly, by number of comments, … You can also decide whether you want to show excerpts and thumbnails or not.

Fiddle with the options until you’re happy with the way your new featured posts widget looks.

That’s all there is to it! Now you just need to write some feature-worthy content! Hope that helps somebody.

Related posts:

1. The Advantages of a Single Page Website
2. Minimalism in Web Design
3. Overchoice, Choice Paralysis and The Paradox of Too many Options

AIDA Marketing Model

AIDA is a model for thinking about how you market your products. There is also an opera of the same name, but I hear it has surprisingly little to do with web design. As I found very little quality information on the web about AIDA I thought I would cover it myself.

The four components to AIDA are:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Attention

The first step in marketing a product is to get the customer’s attention. A big headline, a flashy graphic, an animation or a video. You need something that grabs the customer and draws them into your advert. And when I say advert, that could be an article on your blog, a page on your site, an advert in the paper, a flyer you’ve distributed, a TV ad, a promotional video on YouTube, an audio advert on the radio… Anything.

You have to think of ALL communication with the customer as an advert. You don’t want your customer thinking that, but you need to remember that anything you produce costs time and money and so it should serve to make you money in return.

Remember: Sex sells! A company I worked for in the past had a “booby button” in the top-right corner of the home page; That button got more attention than anything else on the page.

Interest

Once you’ve hooked the customer you need to reel them in. Whet their appetite and make them want more. Your first paragraph of text on your website, the first few seconds of your YouTube video, the most prominent part of your flyer, … these things need to build an interest so that the customer becomes engaged and wants to digest every word of your marketing. You have to appeal to the customer.

Desire

Next you want your customer to desire the product. What are you selling? You need to analyse your product and work out what the BENEFITS are to the customer. It’s not enough to say “Hey look at this food blender!” Your customer will have seen hundreds of food blenders, so you need to tell them why this food blender is going to make their life worth living! Is it faster than other food blenders? Is it the most durable blender ever made? Will this blender make them more attractive?!

Find the desires your customers have and appeal to them with the benefits that your product provides. A baby milk formula might appeal more to a tired mother if it claims it will make the baby sleep better, than if it claims to be the best tasting formula on the market.

Action

Now that your customer wants the product you need to convert them into a sale. You do this by calling them towards an action: “Call now on …”, “Write to …”, “Email us at …”, “Try it …”, “Buy …”

The call to action you use is dependant on your business and the media you are creating content for, but the key things to remember are:

• Keep it short and snappy
• Draw the customer into it
• Decide whether you want to be pushy ("Buy NOW!") or subtle ("Why not give us a call?") and make sure your entire advert is written to suit

Colour

Different colours have different meanings to different people and different cultures. But at a biological level all humans respond most strongly to red. The downside is that red can have negative connotations in many cultures. Yellow, being so bright, is also a good colour for attracting attention. A good compromise is to use a medium orange, half-way between red and yellow, to get the best of both worlds. And, in fact, you will see this all over the web. Orange call to action buttons are VERY popular.

Position

I don’t strongly believe in avoiding “below the fold” content, but this is one case where I feel that keeping content above the fold is a very good idea. The call to action should remain prominent, within the flow of your page, above the fold so that at a glance a potential customer knows what to do next. Drive them through your website, don’t leave anything to chance.

Consider The Flow Of Your Page

Your use of contrast on the page will create some kind of flow through the document. It is worth considering placing elements in your advert that are on these flow lines.

I’ve heard it suggested that there is a set way that eyes flow through any page, as outlined in this graphic, where the eyes start top-right, sweep left and down, then up and right, then finally down again. However I’m not inclined to believe it is that simple. It may be true of pages that don’t have a clear hierarchy or prescribed flow to them, but for a well designed page I believe that the flow will always be as designed by the author of the page.

I’m more inclined to believe in concepts such as the “F-Layout“, but the general flow of your page should also be analysed and considered.

Once you know how your readers are going to scan the page you should place elements at key locations on the flow-lines. So in an “F Layout” page, you might put a graphic to grab attention on the top right, a blurb to create interest on the left below your logo, something to create desire to the right of that, and a call to action on the left at the bottom of the page.

User Experience (“UX”)

All of this needs to be done carefully, whatever you do don’t ruin the user experience of your website. Blend AIDA into your website, rather than trying to bend your website around AIDA. The number one priority should be making your customers happy to be using your website, and THEN trying to hit them with your cunningly written AIDA marketing! Done right a website can be both a joy to use AND an AIDA marketing goldmine.

It’s Only A Model

Finally, remember that AIDA is only a model for considering how to structure your campaign. Don’t assume that just because you’ve applied AIDA you’re going to succeed. A well written campaign needs to consider more than just getting attention, creating interest, desire and action. But it’s a good starting point.

Related posts:

1. Minimalism in Web Design
2. The Advantages of a Single Page Website
3. Overchoice, Choice Paralysis and The Paradox of Too many Options

Spellings, Punctuation and Grammar

Your website is usually the first thing your customer sees and it defines, in their mind, who you are. You want to make that first impression count, so don’t squander the opportunity. But that’s exactly what you do when you have incorrect spellings, punctuation and grammar mistakes on your website.

Here are the most common things to look out for.

Their, there and they’re

They’re over there with their friends.

They’re = “they are”.
There = a position or a place.
Their = a possession.

Your and you’re

First of all, “ur” is not a word. Stop it. Second of all, “your” and “you’re” are NOT interchangeable. Again, stop it.

You’re in a lot of trouble for stealing your Dad’s beer.

You’re = “you are”.
Your = a possession.

We’re, where and were

We’re = we are.
Where = a place.
Were = past tense of “are”.

We’re going back to where the boats were.

It’s vs. its

I’ve had so many arguments with people over this who are so sure they know how to use “it’s” and “its”. Trying to convince these people they’re doing it wrong is hard work.

An old dog can be stubborn, often it’s not easy to change its mind.

It’s = “it is”.
Its = a possession.

Lose and loose

These two are so commonly confused.

Lose = misplacing something, e.g. lost luggage.
Loose = something that is ill-fitting or not tight, e.g. loose trousers.

I’m trying to lose weight.
I’m starting to lose my patience with your poor spelling and grammar.
Your loose use of the English language offends me.
I’ve lost weight so my jeans are quite loose.

Patience and patients

I’m seeing this one more and more at the moment.

Patience = the ability to put up with something.
Patients = people who are ill and being cared for.

Nurse, I’m beginning to lose my patience with your patients.

Of vs. have

“Could of” is not a phrase. “Could have” IS a phrase. The same is true for “should”, “would”, “must”. You can’t put “of” after these words, the word you’re looking for is “have”. This has come about, presumably, as a result of the verbal contractions: “Could’ve”, “should’ve”, “would’ve”, “must’ve”. People have tried to expand the phrase out incorrectly and, somehow, the garbled nonsense has started to gain traction in the language.

You wouldn’t say “did of”. But “did have” makes perfect sense. Similarly I don’t believe I’ve ever seen or heard anyone say “will of”, but “will have” makes perfect sense.

I couldn’t of done it without you. WRONG!
I couldn’t have done it without you. RIGHT!

Less vs. Fewer

If you can quantify the subject then use “fewer”. If you cannot quantify, then use “less”. Or, to put it plainly, if what you’re talking about can be counted (e.g. items, bottles, trees, words) then you should use the word “fewer”. Otherwise, use the word “less”. This is probably better explained through examples:

Ten items or fewer.
I’d have preferred less milk in this coffee.
There are fewer people this year.
A little less gas.

The main exception to this rule is time. Time can be quantified, but “less” is still used when referring to it.

You should spend less time in the pub.

Ie vs. Eg

Again, these two are not interchangeable. They mean very different things.

i.e. = “therefore”, “that is” or “in other words”
e.g. = “for example”

Good use of punctuation is very important, e.g. “Eats, shoots and leaves” has a very different meaning to “Eats shoots and leaves”.
Your poor spelling and grammar can cause you to lose customers, i.e. lose money.

Related posts:

1. Minimalism in Web Design
2. The Advantages of a Single Page Website
3. Freelancers: Refer to yourself as “I” or “We”?

Choice Paralysis (or) “The Paradox of Too Many Options”

“This project has the engine of a Morris Minor, and the brakes of a juggernaut.”

I’ve touched upon this before in a previous post, but today I want to cover more fully a topic I feel strongly about: Choice paralysis.

What is Choice Paralysis?

In a nutshell, choice paralysis refers to the act of giving customers so much choice that they effectively shut down and do nothing.

An example might be a menu system with 20 links in each menu. Another example might be a clothes website that sells 60 varieties of what is essentially the same t-shirt, but with very minor variations between each.

Choice is a good thing, right?

There is a widely held belief that choice grants people freedom, and freedom makes us happy. How true is it?

On the outset it can appear to be a good thing to give customers lots of choice. If Joe Bloggs likes product X then we can sell product X₁ to Jane Doe. And why stop there? By creating X₂ we can sell to John Smith and with X₃ we’ve got a product to sell to Anne Nonymous. Carry on that way and before you know it you’ve got to product X₆₀ and what happens? Now customer A. N. Other can’t choose between the myriad of near-identical products. Whoops.

In his 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less”, psychologist Barry Schwartz looks at how consumerist choice is at an all time high, and yet the maxim that choice makes us happy doesn’t seem to have held true.

Analysis Paralysis

It’s not often I write an article that affects web designers, programmers, project managers, product managers, middle managers, directors and CEOs. But the same issue affects businesses at an organisational level.

We’ve all been in meetings that drag on and on and on, arguing over the most ridiculous minor detail. Who cares if the icon is cornflower blue or azure? Does it really matter whether the link is on the right or the left? Is it really that important that the product have that particular keyword in it?

Analysis paralysis refers to analysing every single possibility in order to maximise profit, to the point where any benefit is lost by the amount of time spent in analysis. It happens in meetings. It happens when a manager is scared to make a decision in case it ends his career. It happens when engineers spend so long planning their new project to make sure they “get it right”, that any benefit has long since been lost.

A government project I worked on back in 2006 was summed up brilliantly by a co-worker when he said, “This project has the engine of a Morris Minor, and the brakes of a juggernaut.” The problem? Analysis paralysis.

Overchoice

I should say that none of this is a new idea, “Overchoice” was coined as a term in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock. His focus was on consumerism, but his thoughts are equally valid in the field of user interface design, of which web design is a subset.

The World Wide Web didn’t come along until 1991, but Alvin Toffler had already laid down guidelines that would affect it 21 years earlier. And now, 21 years later still, people are still making the same mistakes.

Is there hope?

Absolutely there is. It’s simply key to keep in mind a few basic principles when designing a user interface. And, yes, a web page is a user interface.

First of all, try to limit your variations of a product. If you sell hats, don’t make 50 identical designs in slightly differing shades. If you sell sandals, don’t add another 30 to your line-up that have a just ever-so-slightly different flower on them.

Group things together, categorise them, make it easy to search for them by their characteristics with a filtering system or similar. Try a simple test: Get your mum or someone else not familiar with your shop and get them to try and find a specific product, see how long it takes them. That’s how long each and every one of your customers are spending cursing your name for having too many almost identical products.

Remember the 7±2 rule: Keep things grouped together in groups of no more than 9 items, preferably closer to 5.

When building menus keep them uncluttered and spacious.

Never assume that more is more. The phrase “less is more” really does hold true in a lot of circumstances.

Related posts:

1. The Advantages of a Single Page Website
2. Minimalism in Web Design
3. UI Theory | User Interface Theory and Web Design

“I” versus “We”

Well it’s been another long hard week and I’m winding down so here’s a nice gentle blog post to round off the working week.

The question is, as a freelancer, do you refer to yourself as “I” or “we”?

I’ve personally been struggling with this since I started the company. I don’t want to seem so small and insignificant as to be ignored by a potential client, but I also don’t want to seem like a big stuffy organisation that’s hell-bent on stealing the customer’s money.

Having tried both I’ve personally come to the conclusion that “I” makes more sense than “we” for a one-man company or freelancer; The impression that “I” creates is that I am an honest individual (by revealing the small size of the company) and that the buck stops right here with me. You’ll never be passed pillar to post. You’ll never be told it was someone else’s fault. When you deal with this company, you deal with ME.

Clearly it’s up to you, but I’m now a firm believer in the “I” over “We” principle.

Related posts:

1. The Advantages of a Single Page Website
2. Minimalism in Web Design