Dec. 28, 2005
Issue No.4
Neekdesign
SERVICES
PORTFOLIO
CONTACT
NEWS (Previous Issue)
FUN
Happy Holidays from Neekdesign!
We've had great responses to our newsletters and are glad Neekdesign News is providing useful and interesting information. We're excited to help bring your sites to a new level in 2006!
Wine Chooser and Wine Reviews
We recently designed and built two integrated applications for Duckhorn Wine Company.
Duckhorn has a high volume of wine tasting notes for both current and previous vintages as well as a growing number of reviews for each wine. We put all of this data into an easy-to-maintain MySQL database and created the Wine Chooser and Wine Reviews applications to provide additional sorting functionality to the user.
Search with Master.com
If your site has a high-volume of content, you may be a good candidate for a search engine.
Capitol Corridor is using a free search engine provided by Master.com. The service indexes all the pages of the website including pdf files. Results can be displayed in a number of ways. Master.com also provides a weekly email with information on link accuracy to help correct outdated inner-site links.
Please contact us if you're interested in learning more about these applications.
Design: Website Effectiveness
Good website design is a combination of skillful information architecture, a high-level of usability, smart human factors and cool graphic design. Getting here all depends on communication, business goals, direction, style and resources.
The most important thing we've discovered is that clients who know their business and their customers make clear, informed decisions about the direction of their website. They may not know exactly what their website should look like, but they know exactly what and who it is for.
Tips
Does your homepage clearly describe who you are and what you do? Does your homepage feature products without providing direct links to purchase or learn more about those products? Homepage imagery is more than a cool look. To treat it as such frustrates potential customers and throws away an incredible opportunity to sell.
Whether you sell products and services or provide information, good design is more than a striking look. The real trick - and the key to our approach - is to make a beautiful website that your customers will find easy to use.
Utilize striking and intelligent imagery
A picture really does tell a thousand words - crisp, well composed, high-quality images tell customers the level of sophistication of your business. Put your products and services in front of your customers right away. Utilize the space on your homepage for evolving information, and improve customer satisfaction and sales by directly linking products and keywords to their relevant locations within your online store and web pages.
Get to the point quickly
Don't make your customers wait or guess. If you have a "splash" page, get rid of it ("Skip intro" will not get your customers to purchase). Include the beauty of your introduction with the full usability of navigation. Avoid nondescript link language such as "click here." These do nothing to describe what the user will get and decrease your site's usability and search engine standings. Be specific in your product imagery - if you're selling part of a product, use that part's image, so customers know exactly what they are buying, and try to offer a "view larger image" link that provides a larger, more detailed photo or illustration.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should
There are so many cool products and applications out there, it's mind boggling. When evaluating any new technology feature, ask yourself...
- Do we have a customer base that will benefit from this new feature?
- Will this technology work with our existing server?
- How much time and money will be required to maintain this feature?
- Are there concrete examples of other businesses using this technology?
More Information
- Read the full Neekdesign article on website design
- Read Jacob Nielson's "Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed"
- Find high-quality images at Getty Images
Website Stats
All of your webhosts offer site statistics as part of your paid service. Usually, you get to your stats by typing in "http://yourURL/stats" and then typing in your login and password. This may be the same as your FTP or admin account access information.
Your stats will include information on who has been to your website and will crunch this data to show you variations over the last week, month, year or years.
Who cares?
Checking your stats will show you what areas of your site get the most traffic. This should give you clues as to what is working well and what is not working. If a page or a whole section never gets any hits, rework it, disperse the content to other areas of the site, create a small link on your homepage to these areas to promote traffic or remove the content altogether.
Stats will also tell you things like what browsers and platforms your users are on, terms used in searches that led to your site, which search engines have crawled your site, how often the search crawlers are coming to your site and much more.
More Information
- "What can my site stats tell me?" - Dreamhost's Definition of terms
- "Statistics Overview for Web Hosting Platforms" - Verio
- "What are the built-in statistics programs available to me?" - Verio's descriptions of different stats programs
- WebSideStory - included with Nexternal's ecommerce system, but requires a fee to use on your site
Our mission for the newsletter is to provide internet technology information that may benefit our clients. Let us know what you'd like to to see in Neekdesign News.
-- The Neekdesign Team