30 Essential Controls By Theresa Neil As Bill mentioned in an earlier post, we don’t want to limit this blog to just the principles and patterns found in the book. For that you can check out our Explore the Book section. This is the second article in a three part series on patterns and principles for RIA design. Standard Screen Patterns: 12 patterns w/100 examplesEssential Controls: 30 controls for RIA design and developmentComponents for Commonly Requested Features: 15 patterns and examples Every designer has a set of controls they rely on to communicate an effective UI. Unfortunately, no single RIA framework offers all 30 of these. The frameworks reviewed include: Flex, Laszlo, Silverlight and 12 Ajax frameworks and toolkits: ExtJS, Dojo, YUI, Google Web Toolkit, Prototype/script.aculo.us, JQuery, MooTools, MochaUI, SproutCore, LivePipeUI,IT Mill, Backbase. 01. Google’s Auto-Complete 02. Carousel Prototype carousel widget Supported by: YUI, Prototype/script.aculo.us, JQuery, ITMill, Backbase, iCarousel 03. 04.
How we made $1 million for SEOmoz—with one landing page and a few emails When we first published this case study, Moz was called SEOmoz. Even though the company has since rebranded, the techniques described below are still as relevant as ever. In this talk, Moz’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, raves about the work we did, explaining how the money that we generated enabled Moz to develop from a membership site into a web app. Overview Moz is one of the world’s largest providers of tools and resources for online marketing. The company was already highly successful, having a list of Fortune 500 clients as long as your arm. Nevertheless, in the first split test that Conversion Rate Experts conducted for Moz, we generated a 52% improvement in sales. Within the first four months of work, we increased annual revenues by $1 million. Phase I—analyzing the business and designing a more effective landing page We’ve all heard the business principle of “listen to your customers.” After all, it takes time, effort, and money to bring visitors to a website. A wireframe of the page. 1. 2.
30 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website Are you looking to increase traffic to your website? There are many ways to increase traffic to your website. Majority of people believe the only way to driving traffic will cost them money. There are different methods of driving traffic that you pay for, and the majority of them are free. Increasing traffic to your business, website, or blog is the key to building a larger audience. I have enlisted in this post the top ways to increase traffic your website. 1. Squidoo.com Hubpages.com Isnare.com Goarticles.com Getarticlesdone.com Ezinearticles.com Articlecity.com Technorati.com Buzzle.com Suite101.com Seekingalpha.com Associatedcontent.com Examiner.com Articlesbase.com Xomba.com Flixya.com Bukisa.com Triond.com Hellum.com Oondi.com Shetoldme.com Digitaljournal.com 2. 3. Twitter Pinterest Facebook Google + MySpace StumbleUpon Reddit Delicious Digg Tweetmeme Fark Slashdot Friendfeed Clipmarks Newsvine LiveJournal Meet Up Orkut MyLife Ning Tagged Deviant Art 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
30+ principles to a better landing page design | Landing Page Optimization After hundreds of landing page optimization projects, we wanted to share few of the lessons we learned when creating a successful landing page. We hope that you will find this article helpful. Also, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed or leaving a comment. There are four basic components to a successful web page design: Research; Design; Copy and Testing and Modification. 1. 2. The topic of customer research is beyond what we cover in this post. 3. 4. The value proposition will help establish trust and gives a sense of congruency throughout the page. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing | chrisbrogan.com Social media isn’t always the right tool for the job. Not every company needs a blog. YouTube worked for BlendTec, but it might not work for your company. And yet, there’s something to this. Please feel free to share this with others, and reblog it, provided you link back to [chrisbrogan.com] as the source. 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing. Consider this a start. The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here. ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Genesis Framework The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress.
10 Tips to Create a More Usable Web Whether it’s your portfolio, a blog, a marketing web site, or a collection of games, we all want to attract visitors to our website and to ensure that they have a pleasant experience. Usability measures the level of a user’s experience and can be characterized by how easily a given task can be completed; whether it’s done with prior knowledge, or by having the user learn a new way to interact. I think Jakob Nielson probably explained it best when he said: “Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. In this article I hope to give you some form of a usability checklist, covering topics from form design to simple navigation tips that you can apply to any Web project. 1. Letting the user know what section of the site they’re in, or what category they’re navigating through can be give a huge usability boost to any site. As a third option, you can easily create active navigation with JavaScript. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Top 50 Posts on Conversion Rate Optimization No matter what type of website you run, conversions and conversion rate management should be a top priority for your business. If you run an ecommerce website, your obvious goal will be to make more sales, but even if you’re simply generating leads or building brand awareness for your business, you’ll want to have a mechanism in place to help improve your conversions. And since there’s already been so much great content written on this subject, we highly encourage you to check out any of the following posts, depending on where you and your business are in terms of conversion rate optimization. What is Conversion Rate Optimization? The first step to improving your website’s conversion rates is simply to understand what conversion rates are, how they’re measured and what steps can be taken to optimize them. Wikipedia – Conversion Optimization SEOMoz – The Definitive How To Guide for Conversion Rate Optimization ClickZ – Variations on a Theme: Making Measurable Website Changes
Six Blog Post Templates That Highly Effective Bloggers Use | Linchpin Bloggers I follow several blogs quite closely. I call them my “linchpin bloggers,” as they provide me valuable content on a consistent basis. It is my quest to become one of these linchpin bloggers. And so naturally I have been studying their blogs. Particularly, I have studied the anatomy of their blog posts and have observed a basic structure emerge. Besides Michael Hyatt and Chris Brogan, who actually share their blog post templates, I have constructed what I believe to be the general framework for their posts. Please don’t assume this is an exhaustive outline these bloggers always use. Having said that, using these templates can not only increase productivity and make you write faster and more effective (something I’m always trying to do), but they can help you maintain consistency too. So without further ado, I give you six blog post templates that highly effective bloggers use: 1. Michael Hyatt uses the SCORRE™ method from the Dynamic Communicators Workshop (DCW) to prepare every post. 2. 3.
7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert Advertisement Last week we presented 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – we discussed various rules and guidelines from marketing, such as subliminal suggestion, prevention of choice paralysis, AIDA-principle, attention guide and the Gutenberg rule. The main idea was to help designers and developers create a design that would help the site to grow and become a success the financial point of view. As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. This article presents further principles and rules that will help your site convert. 1. There is no reason to stop developing your website once you’ve come up with a design that you’re happy with and that you think best sells your product. You can tweak your website using what’s called A/B testing (also known as split testing). Google Website Optimizer 2. A typical feature description on Apple’s website. 3.
Gary Hamel on Managing Generation Y - the Facebook Generation - Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 By Gary Hamel The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy. If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. These features of Web-based life are written into the social DNA of Generation F—and mostly missing from the managerial DNA of the average Fortune 500 company. So, readers, here’s a couple of questions: What are the Web-based social values that you think are most contrary to the managerial DNA one finds inside a typical corporate giant?
Eye tracking study reveals 12 website tactics Eye tracking studies have revealed valuable information about how people read and interact with websites. One study, Eyetrack III, published a summary of their eye tracking results for news sites. While this is just one eye tracking study focused on a particular type of site, I think there are instructive nuggets here for any informational website. In no particular order, here are 12 results I found particularly interesting. 1.Headlines draw eyes before pictures. But the participants in this study looked at headlines, especially in the upper left of the page, before they looked at photos when they landed on a page. 2. This means you should front-load your headlines with the most interesting and provocative words. 3. The implication is the same as before. 4. No nonsense. 5. Be careful with this one. 6. The point may be that anything at the top of a page will be seen immediately. 7. In online writing as in most ad writing, you have to forget normal paragraph development. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
5 Landing Page Conversion Killers You may not know it, but there are a few conversion killers that stalk your landing pages, hacking and slashing away at your leads and sales when you aren’t looking. They’re quite insidious… you may not even know you’re making these mistakes. Fortunately, there are a variety of studies that can help us out in this regard. Today we’re going to look at a few more research studies that can help you drastically improve the “leaks” your landing pages may have at this very moment. Here are the 5 conversion killers you need to look out for… 1. Designers are going to rejoice hearing this, but marketers need to play close attention as well. All of that typography stuff that your design guy/gal warned you about? They were right: according to this study on readability, small margins were good for one thing — making people read faster. The problem was that they also drastically cut down reading comprehension, and everybody knows that an effective landing page is one that gets it’s message across clearly.
The Foolproof Formula for Writing a Solid Blog Post [Template] You know blogging is critical, paramount, indispensable to the success of your marketing. Without it, Google will stop crawling your site; your SEO will tank; your social media accounts will run dry; you'll have no clout with your leads and customers; and you'll have fewer pages on which to place calls-to-action and collect new and reconverted leads. This all sounds like a marketing disaster . So why, oh why, does almost every marketer I talk to have a laundry list of excuses for why they can't consistently blog? Maybe because, unless you're one of the few people who actually like writing, business blogging kind of sucks. The time for excuses is over. The Blogging Formula A comprehensive, high-quality blog post doesn't have to be long. Introduction The introduction sets the stage for the problem you're about to solve. Have you ever tried to ___________? But do you see why that structure works for an introduction? Body Make sure your ____________ lets you _______________.
14 Instant Landing Page Upgrades Landing pages are a great way to generate sales from pay-per-click ads and e-mail campaigns. Folks click the ad and get a page tailored to their exact needs: You get more conversions, the customers are happy. Remove unnecessary fields. [Bonus: Use analytics. Related Posts Book Review: The 2008 Landing Page Handbook Multivariate Testing: Why You Need It Internet Marketing Case Study: Testing Works