Single-Purpose homepage designs are on the rise. This post covers the benefits and runs through examples of successful implementations along with a discussion of potential SEO impacts.
A lot a marketers focus optimization efforts deep down the conversion funnel. One particularly effective way to examine conversion rates and inform site changes is to filter out visitors who bounce. This gives you a view of your engagement data that shows only interested visitors. And ultimately, these are the ones most likely to convert into paying customers, and for whom you want to focus most o...
Last weekend at Scary SEO, Dave Snyder gave a very solid presentation on Information Environment Design…what the rest of us would call Information Architecture. Duncan Morris also wrote about information/site architecture on SEOmoz very recently. While absorbing both of these presentations, I couldn’t help but think once again of the analogy I repeatedly come back to when trying to explain Info/Site Architecture to people: the filing cabinet.
It should come as no surprise that having a widget or sidebar element on a news, blog or articles website is great for traffic and page views. Online outlets have been using them to boost readership, email-a-friend features and page views per session counts for years. But, did you know that they're also great for SEO? Let's take a look at some examples, and investigate the myriad of ben...
There are lots of people who would class themselves as a developer and would say they can code in any given language. Often the difference between a good developer and a great developer isn't anything to do with the program, how well it works, and how few bugs there are. The great developers make programs that work but they make them in a way that isolates the various components from each other...
It's been a long time since I've blogged about design & usability topics, but I think we're overdue for a revisit. Luckily, in my recent web browsing, I stumbled across some remarkably innovative (as well as several old-school) uncommon design elements that made me take notice. #1 - News via the Logo Sites like Google, Yahoo! & Reddit are famous for...
Chapter 4 of Web Design for ROI is all about landing pages, and it's the best and most valuable chapter thus far. The chapter starts off with this little gem of a quote: Enter the custom landing page. It's a web site's stand-in for ambassador, concierge, and superstar salesperson rolled into one. It's been carefully crafted to meet, ...
In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus (check out their website for more information on the book). Today I thought I'd share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI. ...
I'm actually serious with the title here. This session was great. Honestly, I've been to more informative sessions here at SMX West than I've been to since Pubcon 2006, where I knew nothing about SEO and everything I heard was new. Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains had some good speakers who each provided...
Consider one of the most compelling and confusing parts of online economies -- once someone finds your website, what exactly will they choose to do with it? With a little clever planning the answer is: whatever you want them to.Let's say you've have visitors flocking to your website. They're looking everywhere, at all your pages. Now what? You need to create a clear Action Pa...
Doing business on the Internet means you have an unlimited audience -- it also means you have many competitors. Thankfully you also have numerous options to build your personal path to success on the web. They fall into two rough groups: Traffic and Customers.Building TrafficTraffic is all the people that ...
E-commerce has, for the most part, evolved far beyond the late 1990's cliches of hair-wrenching, sanity-shattering slogs through yet another "clever" designer's take on how shopping on the web should be. Standards prevailed, usability won out, and we're now free to spend our collective $107 million (Census.gov e-commerce sta...
Yesterday, one of the most popular web design portals, AListApart, unveiled their latest project - a survey for web designers and developers. Here's their pitch: People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are ou...
Many of the large content and e-commerce sites we've worked with experience a disease I like to call "page bloat." Symptoms include pagination of content pages, creation of new pages that simply provide alternate navigation methods and site architecture design that follows the little-known usability rule from well-known guru, Wrongy McLovestoClick - "more pages are always better...