Archive for September, 2009

Fonts in Web Design

By Ben Kelly

Fonts. Do fonts matter? Yes, they matter quite a lot. Picking the wrong font can be the difference between your website effectively communicating a message, and losing your audience through frustration. There are some basic rules when chosing a font:

• It must be a sans-serif font. If you don't know the difference, look it up. Sans-serif fonts are much easier to read on screen than serif fonts. Conversely, serif fonts are easier to read on paper.
• Make the text high contrast. It must stand out from your background.
• Write in short paragraphs. Blocks of text are hard to read on a screen. Short paragraphs break up blocks of text, and are also a better writing style for websites - people like bite sized content.
• Keep the width of your text short. There is nothing worse than a sentence that spans a 1280x1024 screen. It's illegible. Try and keep your blocks of text to no more than 600 pixels or so. Use columns where necessary.
• Increase your line height. Give your text room to breath by putting space between the lines. I would advise a minimum line height of 1.5 times the height of the text. Double line spacing is perfectly acceptable (hint: you're reading it right now).
• Make your text large enough to read. There is nothing more frustrating than straining to read text. Designers hate text and try and make it as small as possible. That is a mistake. Your site relies on good legible text to communicate. Make sure your users can read it!

Ben

Have A Bell

By Ben Kelly

I hate clutter on websites. There's nothing worse than having a cluttered up website, or some stupid carousel menu system just because it "looks good". Give me some feng shui and zen any day.

Simple works. Simple means NO clutter. NO bells. NO whistles.

And yet. Judicious use of the occasional visual treat can be permitted. Especially if it's focused on something that genuinely helps your user (and no, I don't mean showing a clock - NO ONE needs YOUR website to tell THEM the time).

What I'm going to suggest is adding tool tips. Add them sparingly, but put them in. They help. People like them. And you might as well make them pretty whilst you are at it: 15 tool tips using jQuery

(n.b. These require some good programming skills to use. Sometimes it's good to tackle things yourself. This is not one of those times. Get someone who knows what they are doing to implement them).

Ben

Alt Tags On Your Images

By Ben Kelly

Search engines look for descriptive words throughout your site. They place emphasis on words in certain areas. One of the most important are "alt" tags for your images.

An "alt" tag is simply an alternative text message, that you would display should the image not be required - for example in a text based browser or on a mobile phone. Within this alt tag, you can add key words and phrases that you are keen to focus on.

For example, if I sell flowers and use this image:

My alt tag could be:

"Picture of a bunch of daffodils"

Or, it could be:

"Buy bunch of fresh daffodils, delivered free in Surrey"

Which do you think is more helpful? Which do you think will impact your SEO the best?

Ben

Credit Experion vs Highrise HQ

By Ben Kelly

There are two methods to get and retain customers. In this post, I'm going to look at how Credit Experian attract and retain customers, and then I'll look at Highrise HQ.

Credit ratings. We all want to know what our score is right? Especially when they offer to point out helpful ways to improve your score, based on your individual circumstances. Plus, when it's free, what's not to like? Credit Experion offer "Get your FREE credit report". Then charge you £7 for signing up, and a further £7 per month subscription. When you try and access your report, you'll be informed there's a further charge of £7. Every time you want to get your score. Annoyed, I tried to find the unsubscribe button to cancel my subscription. No-where to be found. I was told to phone them, 9-5 Monday to Friday. This was on a Saturday. I was not impressed. Then, to top it all off, when I phoned to cancel I was told that my score was completely inaccurate as they didn't have a complete profile on me - which they could ammend if they had more details.

Let's summarise the approach:

1. Trick the customer into clicking an ad. Offer something free perhaps.
2. Get them to sign up for £7 (hey, it's an established brand), and then tell them they can cancel at any time.
3. Charge them a further £7 to give them the information they have signed up for (and by this time they'll have invested so much time trying to get their report - of course they'll go for it).
4. Chuckle at the consumers gullibility.
5. Make it hard to cancel the subscription.
6. Inform them at the last minute that everything they've seen is wrong, and all they need to do is go back and put in more information. Oh, and of course, pay another £7.

The result? An angry customer.

That's one approach.

Let's contrast that with Highrise HQ. Highrise HQ is a lead management SAAS (software as a service), that requires the user to pay the not insignificant price of $29/month. But they give you the first month free and tell you can cancel at any point within the first month and don't pay a penny. They offer a simple, but very effective and quick service. It does what it says on the tin. And then, to my complete astonishment, they e-mail their customers after three weeks to let them know that unless they cancel soon, they're going to start paying for the service.

1. Attract customers through word of mouth and cross-selling (these guys do basecamp, for example).
2. Offer a free trial that's a full version of what the customer will get.
3. Inform the customer before the trial runs out that they need to cancel if they don't want to incur charges.

The result? Potentially, a customer for life.

Take a good look at how you attract, deal with and retain your customers. The old tricks will never compete with the transparent "i'll offer something brilliant and give you every chance to say no" approach. Be remarkable and do not be tempted to perform cheap tricks to keep them hooked in on a bad product.

Ben