by Kristina Parker | Mar 31, 2014 | Interactive, Latest
Designing digital properties is more important than ever for business, and no matter what industry you are working in you should make sure that you understand it and know how to work with it. This is especially true if you are designing digital products because you need to know how to create those products in a way that will make them intuitive to use and good to look at. Designing digital properties such as blogs, websites or any online presence if you want to make the most of your marketing initiatives. In an age where every business is fighting for attention online and through other forms of media, creating an attractive and communicative design that is also technologically sound is one of the most effective ways to stand out.
Designing digital properties takes the right tech and the right approach
If your business is not intrinsically a design company though, then chances are, you may struggle when getting started and creating your layouts.Whether you are designing digital products or designing digital properties for your business, you’ll need to understand the digital space is key. Read on and we’ll look at some of the best ways you can give yourself the edge.
The Right Hardware and Software
The first piece of advice for new companies that want to improve their online digital design work, is to make sure to invest in the very best hardware and software. Software wise, big organizations will of course be able to afford more cutting edge programs that come at a premium, and these can potentially give them the edge if you’re still working with MS Paint. Fortunately though, if you know where to look you’ll find a lot of free software out there that is in many cases just as capable – or even more powerful – than the ‘originals’.
A great example of this is GiMP. GiMP is a piece of photo/image editing software that takes a similar approach to PhotoShop and that can do most of the same things that the famous Adobe offering can. The only real difference? It’s free! Likewise ‘Open Office’ will give you Microsoft Office functionality with no fee, while Blender lets you create 3D files for a fraction of the cost.
Hardware wise it’s worth looking into which devices can give you the edge and help your designs to look more professional while saving you money. For instance, rather than use an expensive graphics tablet to input hand-drawn images, many companies can get by simply using a touchscreen hybrid slate computer with a stylus. This way you can draw straight onto the screen using software like SketchBook Pro.
Likewise why not look into getting a 3D CAD scanner? This way you can save hours building 3D models by instead scanning real objects in and getting the files automatically. Anything you can think to scan can that way become a 3D image for your designs.
The Right Approach
While you evaluate and decide which software and what hardware to purchase, you also need to think about how you approach designing your digital properties, and here the right attitudes can make a huge difference.
When it comes to designing digital properties such as web design, or design for marketing material, remember that less is very often more. Minimalism is very in vogue at the moment – particularly on the net – and the good news for you is that this decreases the amount of work you can do. Instead of looking for design flourishes you can add to your pages and layouts, instead think about the design elements you can remove to create a cleaner and more modern looking page and to save yourself time!
This is something that ‘indie game’ developers do very well. They can’t compete with the 3D graphics of blockbuster games, so instead they choose quirky and minimalist graphics styles – working all in one colour, or using silhouettes, or going for a purposefully ‘retro’ appearance. It’s easier for them, but actually just as eye-catching.
Finally, don’t be afraid to outsource. While it’s nice to do things yourself where possible, think about the time factor and obviously the end result. If there is an outside resource that designs digital properties more efficiently, at a value cost, then it’s only vanity to do it yourself.
by Kristina Parker | Mar 24, 2014 | Interactive, Latest
Web design doesn’t only mean website design. If you’re creating any digital product, be that a website, an app or even an eBook, then you may find that the temptation is there to rush out your final product and to ‘make do’ with work that doesn’t represent your very best. The problem is that it’s all too easy to create these products thanks to the wealth of great tools that take a lot of the grunt work out of our hands. With WordPress it’s a simple matter to create a web design for your website by just tweaking a couple of settings, which can make it all-too-easy to just settle for whatever look you stumble on first.
But if that’s your attitude then you need to be careful. When it comes to making a great impression online, the devil is very much in the details. Cutting corners on our web design can have a big impact on the overall appearance of your site while tweaking even the tiniest factor can make everything look more professional and more impressive – which translates as more visitors, more sales and more profit.
If you want to make your digital product look its very best with just a few minor web design tweaks, here are some of the things that you should consider first…
Animation
If you have a website or an app then it may have some basic animations for opening new pages or closing elements etc. If you’ve implemented animations like this at all then congratulations – you’re already one step ahead of much of the competition.
At the same time though, if you’ve just settled for a stock animation then this might not be making the very most of what you could potentially do. Case in point – have you considered an ‘ease-in’ or an ‘ease-out’? These describe slight changes to animations in which the objects accelerate and decelerate at the start and end of the movement. There’s another aspect to consider too called the ‘overshoot’ in which the object will travel slightly too fast – almost excitedly – and then be forced to ‘bounce back’ into the correct position. While these changes may seem almost imperceptible, they can actually make a massive difference to the overall sheen of the app or website by giving it that professional polish and lending your elements almost a ‘personality’ of their own.You can add more elements to an animation too. Why fade in or come in from the left when you can do both?
Orientation
Here’s something you’ve probably never considered: which way are the images on your website facing? In other words, if your image had a face, would it be looking in at the text, or away off to the edge? You might not realize this, but if you look at professional sites and magazines it’s always the former: all elements point in towards the content which has the effect of bringing the viewers’ eyes in that way too. Again, you probably wouldn’t think it would make that much difference, but now that we’ve been trained to expect this setup, your site will look less professional unless it features it.
Rounded Edges
Here’s a brilliant example of a very small design element having a big difference – rounding the edges of your boxes. Even doing this ever-so-slightly will again show attention to detail and give your app, website or book the appearance of being customized by a professional team and not just created in a ‘cookie cutter’ conveyor belt type manner. Add custom edges to your CSS elements and you’ll notice instantly how much better everything looks.
The Date
We’ll end on a really easy one: if your copyright notice still has the date from two years ago on it, then it’s pretty important that you fix that to show your site hasn’t been forgotten. Otherwise the money you spend on those ad slots will be wasted. Would you buy from a site that couldn’t be bothered to update its copyright notice to the right year?
by Kristina Parker | Feb 27, 2014 | E-Commerce, Latest
Anyone who builds an e-commerce store can’t expect to make money without a good fight. I’ve shown them some website design tips they should implement if they want to increase their chances of making a lot of sales.
Anyone can build an e-commerce store because there are so many templates available these days. It’s a lot harder when you want people to hand over their hard-earned money because they won’t do it. The design of your website could make all the difference and we’re going to look at a few things you should include. By implementing these great tips you won’t definitely become rich, but you will stand a better chance of making money from your site.
Professional looking photos
Nobody is going to buy something if your photos don’t look professional because of two obvious reasons. The first reason is that you won’t look trustworthy, which I know isn’t going to come as much of a shock to you. The second reason is that people want to see exactly what they’re buying and a quality photo lets them look at the product in more detail. They also need to be large enough for people to see them, and hopefully you have more than one for each product.
A quality logo
You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on a logo. You don’t even need to spend anything on a logo if you can design one yourself, but whatever you do it must look good. If you don’t have a quality logo it’s going to be hard for people to take you seriously. Would you take yourself seriously if your logo looked like it was designed by a child? Don’t think it needs to look fancy because it doesn’t. You just need to make sure it doesn’t look unprofessional.
A visible shopping cart
Anyone who is going to buy something from the store will add a product to their shopping cart. You don’t want them to have to go looking for it when they want to proceed to the checkout. It should be in a prominent place above the fold and it should be large enough to stand out. Hopefully it also looks good because this is the part where people do actually need to type in their bank details. You don’t want them to get scared because your shopping cart looks too amateur.
Add social media buttons
A lot of purchases come from people reaching your site through social media channels, so it’s obvious you should have some buttons in your site that people can click on. It doesn’t cost you any money to have them there, but they will bring you in a few sales somewhere down the line. If you don’t want to have too many extra things on your site you might just want to stick to the popular ones like Facebook and Twitter.
Include a phone number
People actually notice a big increase in their conversion rate when they include a phone number. This means you will need a help-desk unless you want to do everything yourself, but most people won’t call the number anyway. They just want to see it there because it will feel like the website is a real business and not something a scammer stuck on the internet when they were bored one day. It also needs to be somewhere people can see it straight away.
Tell them about your USP
If you have a unique selling proposition you want to tell them on the homepage where they will see it easily because it could sway their buying decision. If someone offered free shipping wouldn’t you like to know before you tried to buy their product? If a company gives some of their proceeds to charity it’s also something you would like to know. Work out your USP and incorporate it into the design because you will see much better results.
by Felicitas Ritter | Feb 19, 2014 | Advertising, Latest
So we put all this effort into creating the most informative and watchable online ads in the market, but is anyone paying attention? According to the Goo Online Advertising Survey conducted in January 2014 the answer is… not really. Unless they are especially entertaining.
The survey focused on 2000 U.S. households of users over 18 years of age. While there was a certain amount of inattention to ads across the board, with an average of 36 percent uninterested in either TV, radio or newspaper commercials, online advertising fared the worst by far, with 82 percent of users ignoring them.
One of the biggest problems with online ads is the sheer volume.
Viewers are so inundated that they feel compelled to just scan quickly past. Gone are the days of novelty and glitzy flash animations, intrusive sounds and pop up online ads that garnered healthy click-through results. Online ads came on the advertising scene as an accountable and measurable media. Now, it has gone the way of selling its channel like all traditional media, speaking to impressions and not real traffic building results.
So what can we do to attract more attention to online ads that would ensure to some degree, the same results as seen in the past? Be more entertaining? Works for all other medias, so why not this digital media that has grown exponentially? Using more interesting graphics to draw viewers in is also a must. Telling a story in short succinct visuals that are quick to load isn’t easy, but it is definitely doable. The research cited showed that 42 percent of respondents suggested that interactive online ads were the most engaging. The reasons provided for this preference was that these online ads didn’t really look like ads, were more interesting, and more high-tech looking.
With all the excitement over the Olympics on now, I couldn’t resist clicking on a few online ads that featured our amazing Canadian athletes. Here are a couple of my favourites:
by Felicitas Ritter | Feb 4, 2014 | Latest, Marketing
For any business, having an integrated marketing plan really is the best way to optimize communications efforts. Without this, you could be missing out on great opportunities to reach your target audiences. Relying only upon traditional advertising outlets like radio, TV or newspaper to generate all the buzz you need, just isn’t as effective a strategy as it once was. In particular, if you have a smaller business, you might even want to skip these costly budget-busting vehicles for a while, depending on your market. Even when it comes to marketing for larger corporations, throwing everything into a splashy ad campaign is not generally the best practice. A more strategic approach is to examine all the marketing tools at hand, and take into account all the ways they might help you reach consumers.
If you are not yet working with social media, this is something that really does need to be incorporated into the mix.
As of December 2013, according to the Pew Research Center, 73% of online adults engage in social networking. Additionally, 42% are utilizing multiple platforms. If you aren’t leveraging Facebook and Twitter, at the very least, you are likely missing out on reaching a significant portion of your target audience. For niche markets, YouTube is another fantastic platform to reach very specific types of consumers.
Other considerations have to include direct marketing campaigns or promotions for consumer contests or giveaways, sponsorship opportunities, such as with local sports teams, and special events to launch new products. All are great ways to effectively get your brand out there.
Something many companies seem to take for granted are the impressions received through public relations. Having the opportunity to showcase products for free on local television programs or in specialty publications, or for the company spokesperson to be positioned as an opinion leader can be invaluable to future business successes.
The ingenuity of your campaign is only limited by the imaginations of your marketing and creative teams. And its effectiveness is not always a matter of budget, but rather of good planning and the ability to utilize a wide range of integrated marketing services that work synergistically together.
