Tag: Website Design

The Color of Success

Color is often a forgotten factor in online design. Online merchants spend millions to hone their Web site designs, but they sometimes forget to research their color choices as well. That interferes with their attempt to build a brand relationship with their customers and also affects purchasing behavior.

Color invokes a physical reaction in the human brain. These reactions can perpetuate the mood or tone of your customer in a quick glance, leading to an association of your brand, products or service offerings. You’ll want to make sure that association is favorable.

Psychologically, color can have many different meanings for different cultures, age groups and gender. One of the biggest mistakes an online retailer can make is choosing a color without first knowing how it could be perceived by their target audience. So the first positive step in choosing the appropriate color is knowing exactly to whom you’re selling.

For example, the color white is often associated with wedding celebrations in Western societies like the US, but in Chinese cultures it signifies funerals. Men have been found to prefer bright colors, while women prefer softer colors. Remember, just because you like the color orange doesn’t mean your customer does.

Typically colors can be classified into three categories: warm, cool and neutral. Warm colors like red and yellow are often associated with power, creativity and optimism. Cool colors like blue and green are often associated with beauty and calmness. Neutral colors such as white and black are most popularly associated with good and evil. However, white can also be associated as innocent, and black as elegant.

Plan Ahead

When you’re building your brand online, think about what a color means before committing to it. The following is a reference list of primary colors, their typical association with online viewers, and their possible uses.

  • Blue is many people’s favorite color, and is associated with honesty.
    Possible Use: Software.
  • Green is good to use if you want to symbolize growth or show your company’s power.
    Possible Use: Finance.
  • Red is an aggressive and exciting color that gets your customers’ attention.
    Possible Use: Hardware and automotive.
  • Black shows off power and elegance and works best for expensive or luxury items.
    Possible Use: Luxury Automotive.
  • Orange provides a feeling of satisfaction to your viewer.
    Possible Use: Online Content Provider.
  • Yellow works best to showcase feelings of warmth.
    Possible Use: Kids’ Products.
  • Purple suggests sophistication and passion.
    Possible Use: Jewelry.
  • White is elegant and clean.
    Possible Use: Heavy Content Sites.

Using Color Effectively

Once you’ve done your due diligence and chosen the colors that best fit your target audience, you can begin to utilize those colors to enhance your clicks and your bottom line.

One of the best ways to use color is to draw the customer’s eye to a specific point of interest on your site. One way to do this is by creating contrasts between colors. Contrast can be used to separate points of information, allowing the viewer to easily distinguish the difference between all the information presented. Just be sure to choose colors that are complementary to each other.

For example, colors based on the same hues, like red and orange, often don’t work well against one another. Green and yellow are another example of colors that should be blended carefully, if at all.

Contrast is also important when displaying ads within your site design. Typically, one might think that you should create direct color contrast with an advertisement. However, in today’s online ad space, it pays to look less like an ad and more like regular content.

Build Your Brand

What color is a Coca-Cola can? Unless you are color blind, you know that it is red. You know it so well that you can picture the can in your head and even visualize the shade of red. Imagine you are standing 100 yards away looking at a fence with three soda cans sitting on it. There is a red can, a blue can and a green can. Without being able to read the logos on the can, you’d still be able to know that the red one is a Coke can, right?

Color is a powerful way to drive your brand identity into the minds of your customers. Done right, through consistency over time, your customers will begin to associate your color choice to your products and services. So choose wisely.

Most monitors today can handle millions of colors; therefore, adhering to the browser-safe palette of 216 colors is not completely necessary these days. Unless you’re a stickler for exact consistency, it’s not something about which you should worry too much.

However, that doesn’t mean you should turn your Web site into a rainbow of colors. First, choose your primary color, and then choose two to three complementary colors to use as accent within your site design. This set of colors will become your color palette. Stick to your palette to create a sense of consistency across your designs.

White space is one of the most important graphic elements of any design. It is defined as the space in your design that exists between page elements like headlines, blocks of type, ads, photos, etc.

Too little use of white space can make your Web site look crowded. Too much use of white space can separate and distance your message. Use white space to create a Web site that has “breathing room” for your messages, which in turn makes them more readable and ultimately more attractive.

JIM F. KUKRAL serves as brand manager and director of e-marketing for KowaBunga Technologies, which makes My Affiliate Program tracking software.

First Impressions and Beyond

What’s worse than a poor shopping experience? Rank it down there next to a really bad haircut, or waiting in line at the bank on Saturday morning. It’s not fun.

Affiliates and merchants should take note. Just because you have a Web site instead of a retail storefront, doesn’t mean that you have it easy. In fact, some would argue it’s more difficult to sell online than offline. Unlike a physical store at your local mall, your Web site is one among millions. An offline merchant knows his customers might have to drive across town to find a competitor. Your myriad competitors are just a click away.

In the online world, the first impression that you communicate through your design means everything. It’s how your customer decides if you’re what they want, or if you’re just another speck of sand in the great cyber desert. Once they’re convinced you have what they need, you can concentrate on fulfilling your promise to deliver it. It’s getting past that first hurdle that stops most sites from experiencing great sales.

Here are some ways to help your site stand out from others in the increasingly crowded online community:

Gone In 8 Seconds

As soon as your Web site begins to download onto your potential customer’s screen, the “shopping clock” begins to tick. Typically, you have about 7 to 8 seconds to convince them you have what they need. If you can’t convince them in that short time span, they will most likely be off to the next site on the list, which could be your competitor. So what are they looking for?

Unique Value Proposition

You must always assume that no visitor knows your brand. This is especially true for affiliates who focus on building niche sites that have little or no brand preparation or recognition. Therefore, you need to successfully introduce your unique value proposition (UVP). A clear UVP is essential. It should answer the one question that all online shoppers want to know: “Does this site have what I want? Because if it doesn’t, I’m outta here.”

Here’s a poor UVP for a fake company called ABC Co., and a preferred proposition that offers a bit more:

Poor UVP Statement: The ABC Co., a New York-based business established in 1908 and traded on the NASDAQ stock market, builds, distributes and ships widgets and widget-related products in the US and around the globe.

Preferred UVP Statement: ABCCo.com offers secure online shopping for widgets and accessories with international shipping.

Did you notice the differences? The biggest is that the poor statement is too long and focuses on too many topics, such as the company’s history and its stock. Customers want to know how the site is going to help them right at that instant. The other information can be provided later in the sales process.

The poor statement also incorrectly focuses on what the overall company does rather than what the Web site does. The preferred statement removes all mentions of anything except what the Web site can do.

Having a powerful UVP isn’t only for affiliates and small niche Web sites. Merchants must also be attentive to this, even if they have a well-established brand. Even large companies frequently review their UVP to make sure it is easily understood.

Logo

How you present your logo and tagline is also important to a customer’s first impression. Don’t get caught assuming that your logo or tagline effectively mimics your UVP. Logos are window dressing, and only truly effective in branding of your Web site over the long term. They are not a viable method of displaying your UVP. Lastly, to be truly thorough, try to keep your UVP message on every page of your site for visitors who may have followed a deep link into your site, or for visitors who are referred via an email link.

Home Page Makeover

What your site says isn’t the only thing to worry about when making a good first impression. What it looks like is equally if not more important. Don’t worry though; you can make huge adjustments with some tiny fixes. Let’s get started.

Speed It Up

Sure, more people now have high-speed Internet connections, but at the same time, those people now expect super-fast performance because of it. To give them anything less creates a poor first impression. Action: Optimize all home page images.

Focus and Display

You need a focal point upon which your customers’ eyes will naturally settle. Typically, online readers focus on the middle of a page first, and then move to the left side, then to the top and on to the right. Remember, it’s your job to guide them to your information, not their job to have to find it. Action: Learn from the successes of others. Look at sites like Amazon.com and notice how they focus their customers’ eyes into strategic points on each page.

Call To Action

Effective call-to-action statements should prompt your customer into taking an action. Whether it’s clicking through to your hottest specials of the day or signing up for your newsletter, it’s the best way to get your customer to see that you are trying to get their attention. Action: Use the main middle area of your page to create your most powerful call to action statement. Make sure that it provides some sort of value to the customer, or why would they bother to pay attention to it?

Heading Home

So now your customer believes you have what they need and have extended their “shopping clock” by another minute or so. Congratulations, you’ve gotten to second base. You’ve won the first impression battle that most Web sites strike out at. Now you need to concentrate on rounding the bases and getting back home with a sale. But do it quickly, because the clock is still ticking.

JIM F. KUKRAL serves as brand manager and director of e-marketing for KowaBunga Technologies, which makes My Affiliate Program tracking software.

Profits By Design

Link all you want, but unless your site helps visitors find what they want while enjoying the process, they won’t stick around long enough to buy anything. The big secret is creating a well-designed Web site. That’s easily said, but difficult to accomplish. Quality sites have fresh, interesting content; easy-to-understand organization; visual appeal; and affiliate links that are relevant and attractive.

We asked five very successful affiliate sites to share their tricks for designing a hard-working, pleasing site that keeps users coming back for more. Each site exemplifies a key principle of good Web design.

Build a solid foundation

Thoughtful planning of the structure and content before design began has helped Kitchens.com to fulfill its aim of being the Web’s most comprehensive consumer resource for kitchen design and remodeling. Today the site ranks as the fifth most visited affiliate site in Alexa’s Home Improvement category. Click the site’s “shop” link and you’ll find a sizeable custom storefront linking to dozens of merchants.

Kitchens.com wants to walk its visitors through complex projects (such as kitchen remodeling) while making it look easy and fun. The site is minimalist, with only a few links on any given page. Like a recipe, the site breaks projects into easily digestible steps.

Editor Kate Schwartz stressed the importance of planning when it comes to building a successful affiliate site. Schwartz said the founders spent a full year analyzing the kitchen industry and determining what users would expect from a kitchen design and remodeling Web site before launching Kitchens.com.

“It was expensive, in that one designer and the original editor spent an entire year working on it,” Schwartz said. But the careful planning paid off in reduced maintenance costs, because the site worked well and really did provide just about anything anyone would want to know about kitchens. The structure also allows for updates to be made as new products or styles evolve without the need for adding new sections or reorganizing. Now, said Schwartz, “Basically, we tend to add rather than modify or change.”

Find the right style

A site must appeal to its target audience by developing a unique style using color, typography, arrangement and voice. PowerBasketball.com, a resource for youth basketball coaches, manages to seem friendly and yet professional. Guy Power launched the site in 1998 as a personal project. It’s now the fourth most-visited site in Alexa’s Basketball category. PowerBasketball is an Amazon affiliate, and book and video sales can earn four figures each quarter during the basketball season, which is not bad for a one-man show.

Power wanted visitors to be pleasantly surprised to find a site that offers so much without charging a monthly fee. A self-taught designer, he went through several iterations of site design. “I have spent so much time searching the Internet and studying design, layout, and color schemes,” he said. “You name it, I have tried it. I always liked the look of simplicity and subtle color scheme – the newspaper look.” Power replicated that look by laying out stories in relatively narrow columns on a white background, and adding only a minimal amount of color.

Indeed, visiting PowerBasketball.com gives one the feeling of being on the inside, privy to the knowledge of professionals. The design is a sharp contrast to the amateur look of the site’s competition. Power feels that the current site design will satisfy his visitors for some time to come.

Organizing content and distributing it across the site was tricky. “The hardest part of design has always been to position chunks of content on the main page that will allow the visitor the opportunity to find information that appeals to them without weighing it down.” He wanted to offer enough content on the main page to reassure visitors that the site was substantive, while encouraging them to wander through the rest of the site. Power achieves this by highlighting a small selection of recent stories in the center of the home page but also offering a number of other jumping-off points around the primary content in smaller type. By mimicking the design of more established media outlets, PowerBasketball gets to play with the big guys.

Let content rule

BaseballProspectus.com was launched in 1996 by a group of baseball insiders and sports writers to become an online resource for updated information in conjunction with the group’s annual Baseball Prospectus books. The site, in effect, complements the books.

The Site’s Spartan design makes sense for baseball enthusiasts, who expect endless statistics and reports without much fanfare. In fact, many of the pages look much like the typical stats page in a newspaper’s sports section where sports junkies find their data.

Expect that to change, though. The demands of ever-increasing content are driving a re-design. “We’ve got thousands of paying customers, dozens of stat reports, huge databases filled with player information, moderated chats and as many as 35 new articles per week from a large number of writers,” said co-founder and executive vice president Gary Huckabay. “We have too much stuff for our current design.” The goal of the second-generation design is to make more content accessible via the home page while keeping load time down.

For Baseball Prospectus, content is king. “Promote and spend all you want, but at the end of the day, you absolutely must have the best content in your business,” said Huckabay. “We work very hard to go find the best analysts and writers we can, and that’s the key.”

Maintain consistency

Kendall Holmes launched OldHouseWeb.com in 1998 to be a repository of information, he said, “for homeowners and contractors about living with, working on and restoring old houses. We also sought to build a community of enthusiasts, so old house lovers could connect with each other and share ideas and techniques.”

Old House Web sells a variety of merchandise through HomeStore.com, Rockler.com, and Amazon.com. The site’s biggest sellers on a daily basis are books focused on restoration and remodeling.

Holmes said the basic design concept is to keep it simple. “We try to fit with our audience like an old, comfortable pair of shoes or blue jeans,” he said. That simplicity extends to terminology and navigation. The thousands of pages of information are divided into logical chunks with common-sense topic names, such as “doors,” “cabinetry” or “flooring,” rather than more technical or cutesy terminology.

To simplify navigation, the site employs “breadcrumb trails,” a textual representation at the top of the page showing where the user has been. For example, someone reading an article on waxed plaster finishes would see a bar at the top of the page reading “Home > Walls > Plaster,” making it easy to retrace steps. “But we’re also realistic that no matter how logical the layout is to us, most users aren’t going to be able to follow our logic,” Holmes said. “So we put a search box on every page.”

Attention to design extends to affiliate relationships as well. Said Holmes, “With anything we sell, from anyone, one of our requirements is that we need to maintain our look and feel, so that we can deliver our user experience … even if the final transaction takes place elsewhere.”

Holmes credits the flexibility of the Web services system at Amazon.com with dramatically boosting sales of Amazon merchandise. Old House Web uses the e-commerce giant’s XML feed to brand its own version of the Amazon sales pages, putting its own look onto the design. Rather than just linking to a book page on Amazon, this service lets Old House Web seem to have its own information page with pictures, reviews and samples. People may not even realize they’re using Amazon until they check out.

Help visitors find their way

Ron Hornbaker, founder and editor of BookCrossing.com, struck upon the idea for his site one day in March 2001 and pulled the basics together in one all-nighter. The site is a radical take on an online public library. Anyone is free to join and trade books simply by leaving the book in a public place. Books are tracked online using serial numbers registered on the site and pasted inside them. Members frequent the Web site to write reviews, discuss books via message boards and follow the travels of the books that they “release into the wild.”

Today, the site boasts over 160,000 members and 26 million monthly page views. BookCrossing.com generates up to $2,000 a month in commissions from book sales, and, for good measure, it also sells groceries, ink jet cartridges and gifts that bring in several hundred dollars per month.

When it comes to design, Hornbaker has few hard and fast rules. He stressed that navigation is more important than a hip or modern look. “I’m more concerned with offering a consistent, intuitive navigation interface, combined with a clean, readable content section, that works at all browser window sizes down to 600 pixels wide,” he said. In other words, don’t exclude people just because their monitors are too small.

“The charter is a little place in my head that knows what looks good, and what looks bad,” he said. He’s a fan of simplicity, so he lets text do double-duty for information and navigation. At the same time, he likes to keep a lot of information next to the main content. The deluge of data added to the site each day makes for cluttered pages. For example, each book listing offers seven purchasing links to affiliate sites. He minimizes the clutter by keeping design consistent from page to page and by using small fonts to make these links easy to navigate and easy to read.

“Growing a community Web site is a lot like growing a garden,” Hornbaker said. “You’ve got to lay it out with the right spacing and structure, plant the right seeds, build appropriate trellises to guide the growth, hope for some luck with the sun and the rain (or buy water and fertilizer), and then maintain vigilance in pulling weeds and keeping out pests most every day. The neat difference in this analogy is that a well-planned Web site can continue to grow if tended by only one or a few people, whereas you’ll probably lose control of a backyard garden before it covers your entire block.”

To use another analogy, just try to imagine a library that gets larger and larger without a good index.

CHRISTOPHER NULL is a longtime technology, business, and entertainment journalist. He founded the popular Web site FilmCritic.com in 1995 and is currently editor in chief of Mobile PC magazine.

Databasics 101

Most small business operators have dabbled with databases, but relatively few use them to their full advantage. So here’s a crash course call it Databasics 101 on why you need them, how they work and what they can do for you.

Businesses live and die on the information they collect and how they put it to use. For example, at my company, we send a reminder for unpaid ads on the day following their entry. This provides a timely reminder with an easy link to our payment page.

The key tool for storing, organizing and making sense of this information is a database. Many programs use a built-in database, such as an email reader, a calendar or a contact manager. These programs are already heavily used by individuals and businesses to manage their activities. However, these programs only perform specific functions.

If you want to send email to all of your clients who registered with you during a particular week last year, you are facing a long manual process with standard personal information management (PIM) tools. A database can provide such a list of addresses with ease. It also can track the performance of individual ads, determine your best customers, provide page-view history for affiliates and automate your billing process.

There are a number of excellent databases that run on desktop computers. Some examples include Access, dBase, FileMaker and 4th Dimension. There are also dozens of programming, scripting and report-generation tools for these databases.

On servers, popular databases include Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix, and the freeware MySQL and Postgres. Some of the advantages to having a server-hosted database include the ability to connect from different computers in your office, the option of using a wide variety of programming languages and the benefits of using an industry-standard structured query language (SQL). If you run a Web server for your business, it is relatively easy to connect the Web server to a database.

In my company, for example, we use server databases for both office and Web environments. In the office, we can do on-the-fly queries to find out information about a customer and to determine how much customers spent on each of our features. These queries can be run by anyone in the office, because we access the same common database.

You’re a Sales Machine

Pairing a database with a Web server allows your site to become a customer-driven sales machine. Of course, it will take a little programming to put your business practices online, but the key component is a robust database. With this combination, there are Web sites that support thousands of affiliates, providing customization for each one. The key parameters for each affiliate are stored in a database.

Databases store their data in files optimized for rapid access. You can’t view these files directly, but databases provide facilities for writing and reading information. It’s important that your database provide facilities for backing up this critical information, and that you back it up frequently.

Just about every database has graphical tools for creating, browsing and modifying database content, generally called tables. Desktop databases come bundled with these tools, but for server databases they are often separate products. These tools can help with the creation and casual browsing of database tables.

To take full advantage of a database, you need to look at its scripting or programming interface – a process that may sound harder than it really is. Server and some desktop databases provide a common language called SQL for manipulating their contents. For example, the SQL statement “select email from customer where area code = 310” would select all email addresses from your customer table whose area code is 310. This same statement could be used on any database that supports SQL.

Databases that provide an application programming interface, or API, open their power to third-party or even customer-written applications. One industry-standard API is called open database connectivity (ODBC). ODBC compliance allows third-party applications and programming languages to connect to and manipulate a database.

My company, for example, uses an ODBC interface to connect Java applications to a database. To find all unpaid ads from the prior day, a Java program connects to the database through the ODBC interface. It then issues an SQL request through that connection. The request is something like “select * from classified where starttime > yesterday and starttime < today and paid = 0.” (This is an SQL simplification, but it serves our purpose.) The “*” indicates we are selecting all data from the classified table that meets the criteria.

The classified table contains the classified ad contents as well as information about the ad owner, such as the email address. It’s then a simple matter for the Java program to send an email message reminding the ad owner that the ad still has an amount due. The message can be personalized, and it can include the ad contents of the ad.

This is just one example of how to use a database, but it shows the potential power of one of the most common tools available to small businesses. Doing this operation manually would be a very time-consuming process and would require personal attention every single day. Using a database allows you to automate the entire process, freeing you to focus on growing your business, not just maintaining it.

If the technology is a bit beyond your personal capabilities, don’t despair. Remember, there was a time not long ago when most people were intimidated by the idea of owning their own computer. There are plenty of people around who can help you, and finding them will be well worth your effort.

The best place to start your search for help is from friends who understand the technology. They probably won’t want to do the work for you, and you shouldn’t expect them to. But they can help you screen the person who will do the work.

Professional help doesn’t have to break your budget. In most cases, you should be able to find a contractor for about the same price as a plumber, and often for less. But if you have a complex project in mind, you may want to seek bids from several computer consultants. n

EDWARD ARENBERG, vice president and CTO of EPage, created one of the first fully dynamic Web sites. He manages and develops for EP.com, EPage.com, and AdConnect.com.