What Makes A Great Cover Letter, According To Companies? Advertisement Ah, the dreaded cover letter. Boring to write, difficult to get right, and you’re usually preoccupied by other things (such as the portfolio and resume, which are also really important). Unfortunately, your cover letter is a company’s first exposure to you, and it determines whether your application is trashed or fast-tracked to the company’s to-hire list. The status of the cover letter is changing in the Web industry. While a well-formed cover letter still has a place, some companies believe that Web folk who rely on this archaic tool never make it to the next round. You may be interested in the following related posts: The Old Way: Copy, Paste… Personality-Free Anyone who has ever recruited for a job has received “that letter.” No Sirs or Madams! Addressing an actual person is so important. We trash generic inquiries (i.e. form letters) automatically. I want to click delete if I see “Dear Sir/Madam” or “To whom it may concern.” Bcc Is Not Your Friend We’ve all done it.
10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website. Crime 1: Form labels that aren’t associated to form input fields Using the ‘for’ attribute allows the user to click the label to select the appropriate input fields within a form. This is especially important for checkboxes and radio fields to give a larger clickable area, but it’s good practice all round. Crime 2: A logo that doesn’t link to the homepage Linking the logo of a website to the homepage has become common practice and is now second nature for (most) web surfers to expect the logo to head back home. Crime 3: Not specifying a visited link state Visited link states do exactly as they say on the tin. Crime 9: Telling people to click here
Emphasize meaning over price = More paid sales If you are a performing musician that sells CDs at your shows, please consider this: Terry McBride of Nettwerk told this story at a recent conference: A band he was managing (Griffin House) was doing the usual thing of selling CDs for $15. They'd mention it once or twice from the stage, and sell about $300 per night on average. He asked them to try a completely different approach: Say to the audience, “It's really important to us that you have our CD. It changes the request from a commerical pitch to an emotional connection. Terry said that the band did this for a while, and soon they were selling about $1200 per night on average, even including those people who took it for free! But the important part came next: Because every person left each show with a CD, they were more likely to remember who they saw, tell friends about it, listen to it later, and become an even bigger fan afterwards. Want to try it? So far this is just rough word-of-mouth from Terry, but it seems like it'd work.
Interview with Web Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen In this article, we’ll be focusing on web usability and more specifically, on the views of world renowned usability expert, Jakob Nielsen. He’s been called “the guru of Web page usability” by the New York Times and “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine. Through his Alertbox newsletter and useit.com website, he has been educating hundreds of thousands of web designers around the world since 1995. While his views can be controversial, especially for web designers, he remains the top leader in the usability field. I recently interviewed Jakob Nielsen exclusively for WDD and asked him a few questions that should be relevant to all web designers interested in creating user friendly websites. Can you please tell us a bit more about yourself and how you got started in this field? I have worked in the usability field since 1983: my first projects were with text-only UIs on mainframe computers. I then proceeded to mainly work on graphical user interfaces. So breadcrumbs are definitely useful.
Negotiation Tactics Disciplines > Negotiation > Negotiation Tactics In negotiation, there are many tactics that you may meet or use. They can be fair, foul or something in between, depending on the competitive or collaborative style of the people involved and the seriousness of the outcomes. All I've Got: Limit apparent availability. Auction: Set sellers or buyers against one another. Bad Publicity: Indicate bad publicity of not agreeing. Sequential requests, Resistance to change, Defensive body language, Questioning, Fallacies
Modern Sitemap and Footer Back in the old days, almost every website had a sitemap where they listed out all the pages. The purpose of the sitemap is to help visitors and search engine spiders to find information on the site. Now, a lot of modern websites have dropped the sitemap page, instead they place the sitemap in the footer area. I'm going to review 20 websites (from big corporation to small portfolio sites) who organized their footer cleverly to enhance usability. Benefits of Placing a Sitemap in the Footer Engage user click and visit duration: As you may know, online readers don't read everything on the page, they scroll and scan. Digg Digg keeps their header nice and clean by placing only the content categories. Mozilla - Firefox Thanks to the footer sitemap, with just a glance, I know exactly what pages are available on the Mozilla website. Apple What if you have a huge website (in terms of content), putting a full sitemap in the footer may be insane? GoodBarry White House Miro Six Apart Clearspring SquareSpace
12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know It's no secret that the marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years as social and mobile technologies have gone from early-adopter novelties to mainstream essentials. Still, there are plenty of traditional marketing stalwarts out there who aren't buying all of the social media hype or can't convince their boss or marketing team to experiment in the brave new world of inbound marketing . So we've rounded up a dozen powerful stats that are sure to be eye-openers, if not total mind-changers. 1. 78% of Internet users conduct product research online. 2. 3. 78% of business people use their mobile device to check email. 4. 40% of US smartphone owners compare prices on their mobile device while in-store, shopping for an item. 5. 200 Million Americans have registered on the FTC's "Do Not Call" list. 6. 91% of email users have unsubscribed from a company email they previously opted-in to. 8. 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
Usability Testing on a Shoestring: Test-Driving Your Website FEATUREUsability Testing on a Shoestring: Test-Driving Your Website By Danielle Becker Would you buy a car without driving it first? Probably not. Then why would you consider launching a website without at least taking it out for a test-drive? Usability testing gives you the opportunity to get it out on the open road and work out the kinks. Before you put someone behind the wheel, there are some strategies you should consider when trying to keep costs down. Advice on usability testing is abundant. Usability testing is a way to observe users interacting with your website. Usability testing myths debunked Hiding in that forest of usability advice are some usability myths. Hiring professionals who specialize in usability testing is the only way to effectively test a website. Checklist to get your testing started Having reviewed what usability testing is and is not, I’d like to offer some suggestions about how you can do your own usability testing without putting undue strain on your budget.
109 Ways to Make Your Business Irresistible to the Media Thanks for visiting! Claim your free e-course: "5 Things You Can Do Today To Increase Your Visibility" find media-sexy angles for your bizcreate your own media list and save hundreds of dollarspitch your story to journalists, bloggers and other influencersalways be ready for media exposurewrite your own press release with our paint-by-numbers template Elena Verlee The Passionate Publicist Must Know Usability Tips for Web Designers The hot topic in design news is all about usability. Developers must concern themselves with properly functioning interfaces and applications via the web. However as designers we must tackle projects from a different angle, trying to design beautiful webpages which also run smoothly from a user’s standpoint. It’s not to say these ideas haven’t been around over the past few years. This adds the values of user experience into the creative process and as designers we must keep up with the trends. Begin by Envisioning your Website Wireframe This is the first step during the creative process and also the most energy-consuming. Sketching out a basic wireframe is the easiest way to tackle any design project. Considering usability, you may start out by listing elements you want to see on the page once it loads (above the fold). From here it’s much simpler to draft up a webpage mockup since you know what you’re aiming for. Implement a Plan for Mobile Design Structure your Typography Carefully
50 Awesome Posts on Email Marketing Learn the ins and outs of email marketing, including building your email list, crafting the best email content, email newsletter design, and more in this list of 50 awesome posts on email marketing from 2011. Yup, there’s 50 of them, and they’re all awesome. Bloggers, small or large businesses, and Internet marketers can all learn something from this entire collection… Getting Started with Email Marketing Hit the Internet Running: 9 Email Marketing Tips to Get You Going – It’s time to understand email marketing better and this post brings you a few basic email marketing tips that are the culmination of hours of research. Email Marketing Tools & Services Email Marketing Services Reviewed – Selecting an email marketing service can be daunting. Building an Email List Email Content Strategies Ethical Email Marketing Good Guys Go for Ethical Email Marketing – There are both ethical and non-ethical practices of email marketing. Email Templates & Design General Tips for Email Marketing
Keep On Learning One of the greatest qualities in most creative problem solvers is a thirst for learning. Most designers and user experience professionals I know have some level of post-graduate education. But if you were to dig a little deeper, you would likely find that many have degrees in either partially or completely unrelated fields. Andy Rutledge recently leveled a very stern, yet honest, criticism of the state of UX Design Education in the college system: “Today the appropriate path for UX design education goes around, not through, nearly all universities and colleges.” While there is undoubtedly a gap is this area of design education, thankfully people like Liz Danzico (MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA) and Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson—aka the Web Standardistas—are leading the way by creating cutting edge interaction design curriculum that will hopefully serve as a model for education in our field in the years to come. But what if you don’t live in New York or Belfast?
5 ways to make your content more shareable If you're disappointed people aren't sharing your content, you're not alone. You spend hours crafting content you think readers will love and then—crickets. There's good reason to want to fix that. Shareaholic's data—based on 200,000 websites that reach 300 million people each month—show that 32 percent of the traffic sent to our publisher websites last month was referral traffic. This is evidence of a change in content consumption behavior. Even then, it's not all about the magic solution of social timing. While there isn't a strict recipe for content people love to share, there are some ways to identify what will work for your audience: 1. Before you try a new content marketing strategy, analyze what content worked best for you in the past so you can replicate success. You don't have to completely forget about your most successful posts once you write them. 2. The key to writing online is to have a distinctive writing style. 3. 4. 5. Ginny Soskey is a marketing manager at Shareaholic.