The History of Web-Safe Fonts
I recently wrote an article for HOW's Interactive Design site about the history of computer-based fonts and how "web-safe" fonts, such as Arial, Verdana and Georgia are no longer the only game in town when it comes to web typography. Read the full article on HOW's site.
Testing 101: The only way to scientifically improve your conversion rate
Conversions are king.
A conversion is the most valuable action a visitor of your website can do. Depending on the organization's goals, a conversion can be a variety of actions: purchasing a product/service, filling out a call-to-action form indicating they're interested in your services, signing up to be contacted regularly from your organization (blog, newsletter, special offers), completing a multi-step registration form, etc. All other metrics are secondary to the mighty conversion. You could pay an SEO firm to try to rank higher for particular keywords, sign up for a pay-per-click program, run advertisements through every marketing channel, but if your visitors are not becoming customers at a profitable conversion rate then you're just wasting your money on more browse & bounce traffic.
So how do you improve conversion rate?
Report: The State of Digital Marketing for Small Agencies
This month's newsletter is out today, and it's a detailed run-down of the results of our survey on the state of digital marketing for small agencies. By detailed run-down, I mean detailed: we asked 132 questions and the answers we received are all there in their full glory. I'd recommend taking a look through that information, but if you'd like a consolidated report, take a look at the document I've embedded in this post, which has a synthesis of the survey responses by topic...
The Findings of the Digital Marketing for Small Agencies Survey
Starting in June, we began a survey of hundreds of small agencies in the US and elsewhere. The survey contained 132 questions, covering the operations, business practices, websites, content marketing, social media, web development and sales practices of participating firms. The survey respondents provided us with a huge amount of information, which we've organized, analyzed and prepared to share with you right here. Let the datastream begin...!
Google Analytics in 15 Minutes Per Week
Consider that you take the bait and install Google Analytics, and you set up one goal for each call to action on your site. Now what?
Website Design Style Guide
Last year, I produced a short tutorial video on how to prepare Photoshop (PSD) files for web production. It's a quick overview of the process I use to properly set up and organize template files so that Newfangled's developers can use them to apply the visual design to the site architecture. One of the template types mentioned in the video is a style guide; a very useful "cheat sheet" containing text styles, colors, notations and key design elements that comprise the majority of a site's design. Since posting the video, I've recevied requests to provide an example file that our agency partners (or anyone) could download and use as a reference for creating their own style guide.
Using Analytics to Ensure You’re Getting the Most From Your Site
All things considered, Google Analytics is the best web analytics tool on the market. It is free to use and easy to install on your site, so there is no excuse not to have it. Every site you build for yourself or your clients should have Google Analytics installed from the day it goes live. Once you have it installed, the next crucial step is to log in to it and pay attention to what the data is telling you. That is where things get difficult for some people.
Using Analytics to Understand How Your Site is Working
Many businesses do not cherish the idea of rebuilding their website and with good reason. Very few mid-sized companies have a dedicated web person in the marketing department, and the website is just one of many responsibilities a marketing director has. The website is too important to ignore, but they are too busy with all of their other marketing initiatives to pay attention to the site for months on end. This is how it is for agencies, too. Your agency’s primary function is not to build and maintain a website for your own firm, but, at the same time, your site is a marketing asset you know you cannot ignore.
This common challenge creates a wasteful web development cycle. The cycle involves spending three to six months every three to five years focusing intensely on the website. After the new site goes live, everyone involved goes back to their real job, and the site recedes back into the shadows. Three to five years later, the site gets so far behind the times that it becomes an embarrassment, and the whole process begins again without anyone really knowing what parts of the old site worked and what did not. Applying ninety-five percent of your investment of time, money, and energy to your website over the course of three months every three years and ignoring the site the rest of the time is not an effective approach to managing your most important marketing asset.
The antidote to this wasteful trend is to spread your effort out over the entirety of your site’s lifecycle. Approaching your site in this iterative way starts with paying attention to and becoming comfortable with your site’s analytics.
Your website is no longer just an online brochure that you need so that you look like a real business. The website is the marketing firm’s most important marketing asset, and to remain competitive, you need to make sure your site works as hard as it possibly can.
When you go through the process of building your site, you make thousands of guesses and assumptions about how your prospects will find your site, navigate through it, and decide to take action from it. No matter how much you prepare, the web development process is replete with guesswork. When your site goes live, it is not time to forget about it and move on to the next job; it is time to start the long-term process of reviewing its effectiveness on a regular basis and making continuous and subtle changes based on what your site analytics tell you.
This post is an excerpt from my book, "A Website That Works."
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Nurturing Prospects Through Content Strategy
There are so many benefits to committing to a long-term content strategy as an agency. Your own preparations for your articles and presentations will be one of your greatest sources of education over the years. The content you add to your site will serve as a constant advertisement for you, even many years after you write it. But my favorite thing about a well-executed content strategy is the way it nurtures your prospects.
Stuck in Idle
The August issue of PRINT Magazine is out, and with it, my latest column. The illustration is by Justin Gabbard, which I really like (in addition to the rest of his work, by the way). It's a different type of thing than I've become accustomed to for these articles, but it's what makes the arrival of the magazine exciting for me. I used to wish I could get some kind of preview of the art direction for my column, but I've grown to really love the surprise. Anyway, this one is about information overload and what cost it might have to creativity...