Marketing, Design And Development In Seattle

Two Sites

I’m a big believer in what I call ‘practical design’. And to give new clients an idea of what I mean by this, I will often mention two web sites. The first is Amazon.com (which is considered by many to be the gold-standard of practical web site design.) If you were to take a look at Amazon.com about once a month you’d see that it is always changing in a very slow way; kind of like how people change as […]

New Isn’t Always Better

There is a tendency for all businesses to want to ‘refresh’ their web sites periodically. I get this. Every ad campaign needs periodic updating and let’s face it, for most of you your web site is your single biggest ad campaign. But what’s frustrating me recently is a new wave of ‘updates’ that are actually less user-friendly. For example, have you taken a recent look at the NetFlix web site? It now has a re-design that is seriously frustrating. Yes, […]

Great Ingredients

My cousin is a fine dining chef and he once told me something I’ll never forget. “I’d rather spend 80% of my budget on ingredients and 20% on tools. In fact, I’d rather using a hand mixer all day if that’s what it took for me to get decent meat, veg and spices.” Like I always say, I want you to have the same quality web site as the big boys. The only way to do that is to do […]

Checking Out

As I’ve written before, I’m always surprised how many people hire me to build a store but still have very little personal experience with on-line shopping. Maybe that is unfair. Perhaps they do have experience, but haven’t really thought about their experience; particularly during the all-important Check Out process. When building a Shopping Cart, there’s a tendency to concentrate on ‘the products’ and not that final step where you actually get paid. But in many ways, the Check Out process–where […]

Can’t Afford To Throw One Away?

Spend at least half of your budget on content. Probably more. I know I’m saying the same things over and over, but once you have really crisp, concise sentences organised into logical, non-redundant stories? You’re more than half way there. Don’t believe me? Look at a newspaper. They are the masters of organising a ton of disparate content, with the most limited design tools, into a very readable product that is very pleasant to look at. That’s called good editing; […]

Throw One Away

I have never been involved in any large design process that did not involve at least one throwaway. We designed it, put what seemed like good copy on it and then realised that trying to conform the copy to the design wasn’t gonna work. Some pages look too empty. Some too squished. And many become pointless. The only good thing about it is that it forces everyone to do what they shoulda done in the first place: figure out what […]

Know What You Want To Say

One reason people design before they write? They don’t know what they want to say. Writing is hard. It is much easier to make pretty boxes and flying tabs than to come up with a good sentence.

Lorem Ipsum Dolor…

“Write the copy first.” A lot of people think I’m nuts when I tell them that. Many seem more concerned about how their site will look than what it says. As if the site is some sort of exquisitely wrapped Christmas gift; the outside meant to make the boring socks inside seem ‘special’. Which is why so many design books have that weird ‘Lorem ipsum dolor’ filler. That right there says something about priorities. We tend to think of sites […]

Goals. Not Preferences.

If I could give you only one piece of advice, it would be that old Buddhist adage, ‘Know what you want.’ Most of my other tips are simply ways to re-word this concept. A site has a job to do. Maybe the site’s job is to be beautiful. OK, that’s fine. But I would suggest that for many of you, ‘beauty’ is not the goal. And yet, when most of us start talking about ‘design’, we immediately start talking about […]

SEO Tips for designers

Over the years, I’ve noticed issues of site design that are under-valued or overlooked by clients in favour of numerous SEO myths and eye candy which do not help you get more visitors or convert them into customers. No, there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. That’s the same sentence that opens the SEO Tips page. But these topics are so intertwined that they really are impossible to talk about separately. That said, here are some ideas which are more focused […]

Blog

suggestions on how to make your site more compelling and easier to navigate