Just like other elements on the website, if a spokesperson is not executed properly, it will have adverse effects on your website. It is important that the spokesperson’s script, speech, actions and message are well planned out before hand. Having a clear smooth running spokesperson is a must in all projects.

Stats

Based on research by squidoo.com, studies have shown that most people leave within 8-10 seconds of visiting a site. A website spokesperson can overcome these tendencies for people to leave soon if executed properly. Their research has shown their bounce rates decreased to fewer than 20% after installing a spokesperson.

Charlestomls.com added a live spokesperson on their website and the bounce rate dropped from 66% to 24%.

Research from Studios1.com found that adding a quality spokesperson has increased sales by up to 500%.

A well executed spokes person can/should:

• Increase visitor time spent on your site
• Increase site’s conversion rate
• Explain your company’s products and/or services in a more engaging way compared to text
• Creates interaction between user and website
• Direct visitors’ attention to appropriate sections or features of your website
• Help a website standout and get noticed
• Create a more lasting impression

Tips on creating a high converting spokesperson:

• Have a well planned out script
• Consider the size: Having an overly large spokesperson appearing may scare off users, having a tiny spokesperson may get ignored and mistaken for an advertisement.
• Choose the appearance of the spokesperson based on what would be most suitable for the target market
• Take note of the language used in the message – does it contain jargon or slang that may or may not appeal to your target market
• Ensure that your company’s message is well communicated and allows the visitor to be able to be directed to your product
• Take note of the volume, is a user landings on a page and is blasted by a loud speaker, they will most likely exit your website

 

• Always allow 100% user control. Let the user control the volume of the speaker and allow them to close or pause the speaker on demand. It can be frustrating for a user if they are reading an article and someone is chattering in the background.
• Location: take note of WHERE you put the spokesperson. Make sure it doesn’t cover up valuable content, images or call to actions. Openvision.com is a good example, they have allocated some free space for their spokesperson to be situated so that it doesn’t block out content.

How is it executed?

• The agency will film and help direct the spokesperson which will take from 2 weeks to 4 weeks to complete depending on complexity. They will then code the video and then provide a line of JavaScript code to insert into the site. Either yourself or the Spokesperson providing agency can position the video via the style sheets.

Costs

There are many agencies which offer website spokespeople. Most agencies will shoot the commercial with the model and script of your choice. Prices range from $200 – $900 for 15-30 second videos. Some agencies charge a set-up costs.

Providers

There is much more providers based in the US rather than Australia. Some providers based in Australia include:

• www.webpresenter.com.au
• www.filmtime.com.au
• www.pravasiweb.com.au
• www.vspworldwide.com (services worldwide)

What is the last thing you do before getting ready to launch a website? As humans we establish habits, routines that allow us to complete tasks more efficiently and at better quality.  Each of us as individual has different habits which we have formed. Most people will not be aware of these habits but for those who are aware, knowing the pros and cons of such habits can make you more aware of your situation and hence decrease the amount of careless mistakes made.

Habit 1: You Freak Out

This is experienced by many. You will freak and panic as a deadline draws closer. You find you have hidden energy that enables you to work hard to complete a deadline! A drawback of this is you will become unconfident in your work as you start to worry that due to the rush to things, it may not be to the standard of quality that is to your peak level. Based on the book “Why We Make Mistakes” by author Joe Hallinan – lack of confidence can allow you to pick up more errors in the drafting stage because you feel errors will exist.  The positive side of this is that because you can pick out these errors, your work will be more quality in the end which of course shines on your reputation. You can help erase some of this stress. Consider using a list of things to check during this stage.

Habit 2: Relax and Chill Out

The complete opposite approach to habit 1 is to relax. Often people find as a deadline draws closer, they feel they have done all they can in that time a –  Weather there’s not much to change in this time and the individual just accepts. Or people get over confident and wait for the good news and reviews to come in. The positive side of this is that your level of insanity will remain normal and you will feel good about yourself. You will be able to sleep well at night and have some leisure time to yourself. But with this comes some bad points too. You may being out an image of that you don’t care much about the project or that you have done your part of the project and things are out of your hands so that you can relax.  Confidence is not a negative state, but as mentioned above in Joe’s book, research shows that overconfidence can drag you down as it puts your mind into a mental mode which skips over mistakes.

Please stay tuned for part 2 “Last Minute to Do’s for Designers” the next article will cover habits including getting opinions and asking for payments.

1. Read before proofing

Read all the copy at least once to get an overall feel for the content and layout before you dig in to find errors.

2. Proofread text

When proof reading, check for punctuations and spelling errors. Take notice of misspelt words that may not be picked up by the program dictionary. I have read documents where an individual has used “Crow street” instead of “Crown street” You need to make sure you pick these up as they can mislead and or confuse readers. A great way to go about this is to read the text aloud. Or if you have the time, take 5-10 minutes away from the document before sending it away. Often when working on something for a long period away, physiologically you become use to what you see on the document.

3. Read backwards

Reading headlines, subheadings, quotes, call outs and content backwards word by word will focus on the words instead of the meaning of the document. By doing so will help you pick out spelling or grammatical errors.

4. Double check names

Check if the spelling of names and companies are correct as these will not be picked up by spell-check programs. Always check letter by letter that these are spelt correctly.

5. Double check numbers

Check all numbers carefully. You can even call listed telephone numbers to verify. If addition, substruction of form data is present in the document, make sure you check these as well.

6. Are inconsistencies present?

Check for inconsistencies such as small caps for abbreviations as well as bolded text, italics and heading font sizes. At times, I have been so involved into a website design that I found that the line spacing in the web design differ from template to template.

7.  Look at the typography

Look at the document as a whole. Does the page flow properly? Are the headings too dominating/not dominating enough? Is there a clear hierarchy?

Call to action buttons are buttons which encourage users to do something on a page, e.g. lead them to fill out a consultation form or make users want to purchase a product via a “buy now” button. Therefore, it is important that these buttons do it in the most effective way possible. On the web, there are many ways in which call to actions can be used. Here are 5 quick tips to help you choose and or design effective call to action buttons.

Call to action buttons are buttons which encourage users to do something on a page, e.g. lead them to fill out a consultation form or make users want to purchase a product via a “buy now” button. Therefore, it is important that these buttons do it in the most effective way possible. On the web, there are many ways in which call to actions can be used. Here are 5 quick tips to help you choose and or design effective call to action buttons.

Tip 1: Big is beautiful, always make sure your main call to action is the biggest button on the page

• Large buttons are more obvious
• Always place the main call to action button above the fold
• Use contrasting colours to the background so it can stand out
• Use uplifting action words such as “Sign Up”, “Buy Now” , “Order Today” or “Discover”

Tip 2: Use appropriate supporting graphics

• Graphic s should always relate to you call to actions
• Use bullet points near your call to action button as this draws attention and allows the user to scan and soak in the content easily
• When possible, use testimonials to communicate the positive aspects f your company. In this way, it will not look like you are gloating.
• Use a lot of white space:  white space in web design actually can draw attention to elements. So by placing ample white space around your call to action, you will make it stand out more.
• Avoid lengthy paragraphs above the fold. Content about the fold should be short and concise.

Tip 3: Use repetition

• Add more than 1 form of call to action buttons on the page to reinforce and to ensure the user does not miss it. E.g. placing another call to action near at the bottom of the content so the user does not need to scroll up to find it.

Tip 4: Tell users what is in it for them

• Users do not care how great a company is if the company cannot help them. Therefore, be sure to communicate how you can help them. When doing so, use personal language to reduce the gap between the company and its users by using words like “us” and “together.”

Tip 5: Reduce number of choices

• Choice is normally a good thing, but if your users spend too much time deciding which the best thing is, you have a problem.
• Provide only a few choices with detailed descriptions.
• To aid users more, consider highlighting the most popular option to speed the process of conversions.

 

1. Your gut feeling – think about it

When you see a design you do not like, you first reaction may be to say “I don’t like it!” if you cannot provide reasons why you don’t like it, keep it to yourself for the time being. Instead, try asking why. e.g. “Why did you use this purple and white colour scheme when our company’s corporate colours are green and blue?” You may find a hidden meaning which you could not think about, or you can shine some light onto the designer you are working with to improve. Sudden expressions such as “I don’t like, I just don’t like it change it” is useless feedback as it does not give the designer any where to go from there.

2. Be specific and offer suggestions if appropriate

The more specific you are in complimenting or criticising a design the more helpful you will be. Use descriptive terminology, point to areas where you feel need improvement and the reasoning’s why and then back up your thoughts with reasons. These will help the designer work more efficiently rather than guess work.

3.  Consider the audience, always

One day you may be presented with a website designed for the under 20’s age group. Take this into consideration. The easiest way to judge if a website is appropriate is to put yourself in the users shoes.

4.  Know the jargon

The best thing to be able to give proper criticism and to become a more educated designer to study the principals used to judge design and to learn the jargon that goes with it. In order to critique form, you need to know the principals and patterns and why things are done in the way they are. Without understanding the bare basics, it would be difficult

1. Memorable and delightful

To design for delight is to make a design memorable and remarkable. Attractive things work better to create a memorable, therefore imagery works best. By adding small touches to your site, it makes your web design stand out just a little bit more. E.g. creating little pop ups as you scroll through a page as been by bountybev:

Having things out of place gives a webpage a sense of uniqueness and diversity e.g. having images that are on a slight angle also make a web design memorable

2. Keypress Navigation

As designers are making their designs more responsive, one way to make a web design more interactive is to incorporate key press navigation. The idea of key press navigation is to allow users to use keyboard shortcuts to do tedious tasks such as pressing a next button. An example would be Mad-ar.ch (Marc Anton Dahmen) website whose navigation is quite advanced using keyboards to go to different pages on a website and using other keys to scale and move through images.

3. Print Design Influence

Although print is slowly becoming outdated, it still lives in the digital world. Many websites today have been designed based on the rules in print designs. Print inspired web designs include striking headings, multi column text, highlighted quotations, indented text, supporting imager, sidenotes, footnotes and a strong sense of typography.

3. Horizontal Designs

Websites with horizontal scroll bars have been more difficult to navigate because the mouse was designers for vertical scrolling. But now with the emergence of multi-touch devices forces us to rethink the usability of such designs.  Plug-in such as Scrollable and jScrollHorizontalPane make this happen.

4. Strong Rich Typography

Typography has always been a strong element to web pages and now in 2010 they are more dominant than ever. Using embedded fonts makes a web design more memorable also so be sure to include different font faces and large type sizes. There has also been a push to use serif fonts supported with large imagery. Within the typography, consider using different colours to the basic black. E.g. using a deep blue instead of black gives a page more depth and appeal.

White or light coloured background

Magazine sites are generally very content heavy, therefore readability is a big issue, therefore using a white or light coloured background is ideal. There are exceptions to this however, the majority of popular magazine websites use white background, so why re-invent the wheel?

Grid Based Layouts

Layouts of new sites are often grid-based. Grids are especially effective in magazine web sites because the designs generally consist of multiple columns. To have consistency with so many columns in a web design is ideal and from using a grid, it will help organise the information.

Typography Design Element

News websites have a lot of content on a page which consist of headers, headlines, images, navigation, lists and advertisements wold overcrowd a website if there were many design elements around it – so why not use these headlines as part of the web design. By using large typography and adjusted spacing, a website design can look more memorable.

Image Thumbnails

Most (if not all) print magazines include pictures into their articles and thumbnails in the contents page so the same should apply to web design. Using thumbnail images to link to an article allows users to quickly understand what an article is about as well as draw attention and interest in it.

The Search Bar

The search bar should be prominent on the website for usability. News and magazine websites have so much content it would be frustrating for a user if they cannot find or control what they read – so put a search bar on the page and make sure it stands out so the user can find it quickly!

Navigation

Plain navigation which links to home, company, about, contact is simple but as there are so many articles consider sorting them into categories to make it easier for the user to access the articles. The uses of horizontal menus with vertical menus will also assist in usability. Horizontal menus are common for primary navigation and vertical menus for primary navigation.

1. Add a blog

A blog is an excellent way to add fresh content regularly and easily. Search engines love fresh content and providing that would increase your web rankings dramatically. Including keywords which your website wishes to target will also aid increasing search engine rankings. Blogs also increase the likelihood of potential customers social bookmarking a post and sharing it among their social networks which in turn will increase your company branding.

2. Add Google Analytics to each page

Google Analytics is a free software package which shows you statistics of your websites visitors, bounce rates, traffic sources and more! it is a great tool for keeping track and determining how your website can better perform. I highly recommend using this software so you can increase the number of visitors to your site.

3.  Reduce Code Bloat

Google and other search engines find your website via spiders. These are robots which scan your website, look at the content and from there will determine the rankings. If your website has blocks of code that are not related to your keywords such as java script, either move it to the bottom of the page, or source it to a different location! The less”extra” code the spiders crawl through, the better your website rank! Excessive code also slows down your

4. Make each page unique

Search engines rank the relevance of each website according to it’s content – therefore the more unique the content is, the better as it provides credibility to your website. Each page of a website should ideally be different to each other page and not from another another website either. Having the same content as a different page means there is duplicate content which will bring a websites rankings down.

5.  Use Meta description tags

Meta description tags are what appears on search engines result page – it is like a blurb of a web page. Meta descriptions give an overview of what the site is about making it more user friendly which is a big plus in SEO

6. Remove repetitive working from the website layout

Similar to duplicate content, repetitive wording may come off as spam.

7. Footer Site Links/Walks

Linking between web pages using text links with the keyword targeted for SEO will increase website rankings. Sitewalks are also very user friendly and are highly recommended.

1. The ideal search box is 27 characters

Jakob Nielsen performed a usability study on the length of search queries in website search boxes (Prioritizing Web Usability) with the finding that the majority of today’s search boxes are too short (18 pixels). Even though you can type out a long query, only a portion of the text will be visible at a time, making it difficult to review or edit what you’ve typed. Extending the box to 27 characters has found to have a 90% increase of conversions. In short, search boxes are better to be too wide than to be too short.

2. White space is better for reading

White space is the empty space in-between paragraphs, graphics and other elements on a page. White space de-clutters a page making scanning content more comfortable. When used appropriately, it can also help elements stand out.

3. Effective testing need not be extensive

Jakob Nielsens tests show that the ideal number of test in usability for a website is that only 5 users would reveal about 85% of all the problems with your wesite whereas 15 users would find pretty much all problems. The biggest issues are normally picked up by the first 2 users and the following users will confirm.

4. Informative pages help you stand out

If your website sells products – people who are shopping online will defiantly look at the product details. Therefore, it is important to provide plenty of information – in this case, providing too much information is better than not enough. However, take note of how you word your content – make sure it is easy to digest, scannable and does not have jargon that your target audience may not understand. The more information your product has, the more confidence you build with your customer. And ALWAYS use pictures.

5. Users are blind to advertising

When a user enters a site, they will scan for the information they need and often will ignore the advertising banners completely. If they are interested in a particular snippet of content on the page, the banners on the side will not distract them. However, they will also ignore anything that looks like an advertisement. Therefore, any graphics or call to action buttons you may use – make sure they don’t look like an ad. If you struggle to not make it look like an ad – make sure the style is the same as the website, so that is fits in together.

1. Pop-Ups

They interrupt the browsing session, pop ups should not be used unless necessary. They can also be mistaken for advertisements. This is the same for having pages open automatically in new browsers – users like to have 100% control so keep it that way unless specified.

2. Changing window sizes

The same argument as the one against pop-ups holds. Some users set their size of their browsers, e.g. Internet Explorer to use them for further browser sessions. It would be very frustrating for the user if the window sizes keeps changing to what they normally want.

3. Small fonts

Font sizes shouldn’t not be any smaller than 10pts for body copy, it is hard to read and it tiring for readers. Follow the web 2.0 style: large fonts are the way to go.

4. Unclear text links

Links on a page should be clear. Make links obvious by making them different to the body copy with the use of colour, font-weight, text-decoration and or Have precise obvious links and lead to the destination they describe.

5. Dead links.

Fix all dead links or 302 them. Pages which go to 404 errors frustrate users and also affect page rankings.

6. More than one animation per page.

Take for example, if you are on a page looking up information about home loans, but there is a side bar with a moving advertisement and an moving gif image under the content and something else in the header, your eyes will get distracted. Animations distract users from the content of the page.

7. No contact form

If visitors can’t contact you easily, they lose trust in you. Contact forms should be a must in all websites, or at least a phone number which is easy to find. Not having a contact phone or phone number on a website is bad customer service which may reflect in your company’s image.

8. Links open in new windows

Visitors want to have control over everything what happens in their browser. If they’d like to open a link in a new window they will. If they don’t want to, they won’t. If your links open in a new window you make the decision which is not your decision to make.