Scott Design

Whether you are developing a new website, or you’re looking to improve your existing website, there are three basic aspects of your website you should examine: Usability, Content, and Design.

Usability

Always consider the experience of your site visitors when designing your website. Your site should be well organized and easy to use, allowing site visitors to quickly find the content for which they are looking.

• Make sure your top-level navigation is easy to locate and consistent throughout the site. It should be in the same place on every page.
• Avoid “battling” navigations. On your home page, do not include a navigation running across the top of the page and an additional navigation running down the side.
• Establish a site architecture that makes sense to your audience, without duplication of content.
• To help site visitors choose where to click, keep main navigation choices to a minimum of five or six, with only one or two special calls to action on the home page.
• Track what visitors to your site are doing. To analyze site traffic and to see what browsers visitors are using, set up Google Analytics on your site.

Content

Take the time to hone your messaging so home-page visitors can quickly determine who you are, what you do, and how you are different from your competitors.

• Keep content on each page to a minimum. Only include information that is engaging, interesting, and important to your customers.
• Make it easy to contact your organization, providing multiple options: e-mail, inquiry form, phone number, address, and a map to your location.
• Web copy should be clear, concise, and to the point. Bloated marketing “fluff” is only going to keep site visitors from understanding what you do.
• Keep search engine optimization (SEO) in mind by having an organized site where descriptive page titles correspond to headlines on the pages. Determine keywords your customers might use in an online search and use them on your site pages. Use Google Analytics to see which words they’re searching for online.
• Most importantly for SEO—produce remarkable content to which people want to link to.

Design

Know your target audience and design a site that appeals to them. Your site should be visually memorable and stand out from your competition, but still be appropriate for your audience.

• Establish two or three primary colors to use on the site.
• Include images and graphics that support your messaging and help site visitors understand the content, but do not include images simply as filler. And keep the images small and optimized for the web.
• Use two web fonts—ones that everyone has installed—at the most.
• Avoid internal scroll bars within a page, frames, and tables.
• Include only one animation per page, including banner ads. And only include animation if it helps clarify your message.

The most important way to improve your site is to make sure that visitors can find you online, they can get the information they need once they get to your site, and that the design and structure appeal to them so they stay on your site.

This article was originally created for How To Santa Cruz, a feature of the 21st Annual Business Fair in Santa Cruz.

I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Stu Carty at Constant Contact last week and he did a great job of laying out the best practices in e-mail marketing. Stu first defined the basic goal of e-mail marketing: Deliver professional e-mail communications, to an interested audience, containing information they find relevant, timely, and valuable, and that conform to best practices and anti-spam laws.

Following is a summary of all the great information Stu shared, which you can read all about in his full presentation.

1. Connect: Build good, permission-based e-mail lists

In order for you to legally use an e-mail list, it must be filled with customers with whom you already have a relationship. There are some great ways to build your contact list:

• collect e-mail addresses at events, meetings, trade shows
• get sign ups on your website and social networks
• ask for e-mail addresses in person or on the phone
• ask customers to sign up at a retail location
• add e-mail addresses of your colleagues and business associates
• include all of your past and current customers

Although you can legally buy or sell a list of e-mail addresses, it is illegal to use it to send e-mails! If you want to reach out to new customers that you’ve never met, you can use direct mail, advertising, web marketing, telemarketing, and event marketing—not e-mail marketing.

2. Inform: Create and send targeted e-mail campaigns

You should create a master calendar with all the e-mails you plan on sending. There are three main types of e-mails you should consider adding to your e-mail marketing calendar:

• Newsletters—monthly or quarterly e-mails featuring educational content
• Promotions—bi-weekly or monthly e-mails featuring promotional content, offers, coupons
• Announcements—periodical e-mails, depending on content, which usually includes targeted messages about invitations, new products, or special events

When building your e-mails, consider everything that will help your e-mail get past spam filters, get opened by the recipient, and cause them to click on your links:

• Design or select a clean, well-designed template that represents your company and brand
• Use a real person’s name in the “from” line
• Write an honest, straightforward, simple “subject” line
• Catch the reader’s attention in the first lines of the body of the message
• Keep it short and simple—include 2 to 3 newsworthy topics only

For more information on creating e-mails that work, read Getting your HTML e-mails delivered, Getting your HTML e-mails opened, and Getting your HTML e-mails read, Two little words: Subject Lines, and Watch your language in your e-mails!

3. Grow: Evaluate results and refine the process

Creating a robust e-mail marketing program is an ongoing process. You should be sure to analyze every e-mail you send out to find out what works with your audience, and what doesn’t.

Most e-mail service providers offer analytics on each of your campaigns, including information on who did and didn’t receive your e-mail, who opened the e-mail, which links they clicked, and more. You should use this information to find out which types of information are most interesting to your readers.

If your readers are divided on what they like, consider splitting your list into two or more lists, each with e-mails targeted to that list. Remember, your goal is to deliver information your recipients find relevant, timely, and valuable.

A few e-mail stats (be sure to test for your particular situation):

• Average open rates = 15-20% (For large companies, this number falls to 10%)
• Expect 1 person to click on “spam” for every 1,000 e-mails you send
• Include 3 or fewer links in one e-mail
• Use 5 or fewer graphics in one e-mail
• Best days to send e-mails: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
• Best time to send e-mails: 10 am to 3 pm

Do you have any best practices you’d add to this list? Let me know in the comments section.

The Scott Design solution:

Philip Zahm had attracted considerable attention by recounting his travels around the world in pursuit of exotic gems. Our creative professionals helped Zahm Gems devise a campaign that would bring Philip Zahm’s true tales of foreign gem-buying intrigue to resellers and individual customers. Focused on portraying an adventurer who would stop at nothing to acquire the best, most exotic colored gems, Scott Design created a logo and overall advertising look highlighting Philip Zahm’s danger-tinged travels to acquire stunning gems in exotic places.

Scott Design also created a new logo and identity for Zahm Gems. Business cards feature a range of colors to showcase Zahm’s thirty-year experience in creating jewelry with colored gemstones.

Inside Adobe InDesign featured Scott Design and our real-world example of business collateral as an example that they felt represented the epitome of our profession.

It’s great when you get a chance to help a longtime friend celebrate their birthday. And that’s what Scott Design got to do when we were asked to create a special landing page celebrating the 20th anniversary of the creation of Photoshop.

The designers at Scott Design use Photoshop, some since the first version came out in 1990. We use it every day for designing and producing web and print work. So it’s kind of fun to help highlight all the cool stuff about one of our favorite design tools.

Take a look at the finished page, including the interactive timeline we created. There’s information about the history of Photoshop, the people who made this great piece of creative software, and the evolution of the interface and packaging.

It’s a fun learning experience for folks new to Photoshop, and a nice trip down memory lane for those of us who have grown up with Photoshop.

WordPress is a great platform for creating your blog, but should you create your entire website using WordPress? Having created both blogs and entire sites on WordPress before, we’ve learned that there are some good reasons to use WordPress to create your website, and some good reasons to use another solution.

Here’s a quick rundown of the good, the bad, and our experience using WordPress to create websites.

Software: Frequent upgrades, plenty of plug-ins, large user base

• Good: WordPress is an open-source project and there are plenty of developers, so security flaws get patched quickly and new features and plug-ins appear regularly. The large, helpful community of users can help you fix problems. If you’ve had the problem, chances are, someone else has too.
• Bad: Plug-ins can sometimes stop working when you upgrade WordPress to the latest version. Since plug-ins are often developed by individuals, mostly volunteers, fixes aren’t always done immediately.

Functionality: Built-in search, search engine optimization (SEO)

• Good: WordPress has a built-in search function and facilitates SEO. The search function is easily added to all pages of your site. WordPress allows you to tag all contents, create custom keyword-rich URLs, and allow trackbacks and pingbacks, all of which help your site to be found in online searches.
• Bad: WordPress search is limited — results are sorted by date, not relevance, and there are no advanced searching options. For a more robust search function, you should install Google Site Search on your WordPress website.

Platform: Based on PHP and MySQL

• Good: Allows experienced developers to completely customize sites.
• Bad: Not as easy to customize for non-developers or those who know only HTML. WordPress has its own PHP syntax and functions that create a bit of a learning curve, even for experienced PHP coders. Also, you can’t just preview a post in your browser without having a WordPress testing server set up.

Design: Plenty of templates

• Good: Even if you don’t hire a designer to customize your site, there are enough templates so your site won’t look like everyone else’s site.
• Bad: The templates are not designed to further your brand. You may find one that is similar to your current branding, but it won’t match exactly. You might want to start with a simple template, which takes care of a lot of the drudge work of setting up the site. Then, to customize the template to match your branding, you definitely should be (or hire) a web designer/developer. If you want to make some pages in your site look significantly different from a regular “blog” structure, you will need to spend a lot of time working with style sheets and PHP.

Updates: Content Management System (CMS)

• Good: Can be used as a simple CMS, and it is relatively standards-compliant. Adding new content doesn’t require much training and there are many plug-ins you can use to add CMS functionality to your site.
• Bad: With some work, you can turn WordPress into a CMS, but WordPress is not really a full-featured CMS. For example, WordPress won’t keep you from introducing bad code if you use Word to write your posts instead of WordPress. It also doesn’t do workflow management or track user roles.

Overall, creating a website with WordPress is straightforward, especially if you are happy with an existing template.  However, if you want to customize the look and functionality of the template, you’ll need to have robust web development skills, or hire a developer.

It’s important to keep in mind what WordPress does well, and what it does only with great effort, so you can have realistic expectations from the beginning. As long as you want your site to leverage WordPress’s strengths, such as blogging, posting frequent updates, and sorting by date or alphabetically, WordPress is a good way to go. But if you’re looking for a straight CMS, highly customized page layouts, but few of the blogging features of WordPress, you’d probably be better off going with a straight CMS solution, not WordPress.

For a look at a website that Scott Design created entirely in WordPress, visit the CTW website.

What would you add to this list?

You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to put together a social media marketing plan. But you do need to make sure you’ve got the right stuff to make it work. Creating a successful online marketing plan takes bright ideas, good hearing, a big heart, fast hands, a funny bone, and stamina.

Bright ideas
Before you get started online, you should develop objectives, goals, and strategies for your marketing efforts.

Good hearing
Don’t make a move until you listen and monitor what’s happening online in your market, including following all mentions of your company or brand, your competition, and industry keywords.

Big heart
You should plan on sharing your passions and company culture as part of your online outreach. And be as helpful as possible by sharing your expertise and knowledge with others.

Fast hands
Be prepared to put your writing skills to the test by creating plenty of valuable online content.

Funny bone
Make sure what you share is interesting and funny—and be prepared to take a ribbing for your ideas once you join in online conversations.

Stamina
Any social media marketing program takes a long time to bear fruit, so be prepared to keep the energy up in the long run.

For more information on planning a social media program, check out “5 steps in a social media marketing plan” and read how to get started with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

With so much being published about the use and misuse of augmented reality (AR), we thought it was time to remind people of the most important thing about new technologies: the fun that you can have with them!

What is augmented reality?

Augmented reality is the combination of real-world video with virtual computer-generated imagery. Using a webcam, an AR app can capture an image on video, recognize objects in the real world, and let you interact to with the application through your video camera. The results are a mixture of the real world and a virtual world, or, an augmented reality.

We have had hours of entertainment sticking our friends’ faces on dancing elves with Elf Yourself. We’ve been mesmerized by AR projects, such as the GE Smart Grid and tobi.com’s Virtual Dressing Room. But at Scott Design, we wanted to create an AR app where you could combine video of yourself with something fun and beautiful.

Introducing the Augmented-Reality Snowstorm

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Augmented-Reality Snowstorm, where you can put yourself or your family in a virtual snowstorm. Instead of just adding yourself to a piece of art, or playing around with a business app, you can add a peaceful (or not so peaceful, depending on your preferences) snowfall to your life.

All you have to do is download an AR marker, visit the Augmented-Reality Snowstorm, and hold the marker up to your webcam. Your video camera shows your image and picks up the image of the marker and it begins to snow on you. You use the marker to control the snowstorm by twisting and turning it, plus you can add more flakes or make the snow fall more quickly by using on-screen sliders. When you’ve got your snowstorm just how you want it, put down the marker and just enjoy the snowfall.

Don’t have a webcam? No worries!

If you don’t have a webcam, you can still have fun with the Virtual Snowstorm. Instead of using the webcam and marker, you change the snowstorm using a series of on-screen sliders.

More holiday fun

When you’re done making it snow on yourself, you can go back inside and visit the Scott Design Holiday page and play with the Snowflake Designer, curl up by the Virtual Fireplace, try your hand at Snowbash, and send out your holiday greetings using Special Delivery. They’re all part of our collection of online apps designed for just one thing: having fun!

We wish you happy holidays and a prosperous new year!

The Scott Design Team

Scott Design has been awarded an Innovator Award in the 2009 Summit Emerging Media Award competition for the online application Special Delivery.

The Summit EMA competition is based on the premise that advertising is consistently at the forefront of the technological evolution of communication. “Those involved in today’s emerging media technologies are the leaders who are establishing tomorrow’s avenues of advertising communications.” Said Jocelyn Luciano, Executive Director for the Summit International Awards (SIA). “Most communication professionals recognize that established avenues of communication can be reliable and safe.  Developing and engaging in emerging media technologies, along with creative messaging and market awareness, is often a difficult criterion which makes earning a Summit EMA a significant achievement.”

Special Delivery is an innovative application that lets you easily create your own web pages to share with families and friends. You can select backgrounds, add messages, include animations, and even add a slide show of your photos. You can use Special Delivery to make an online holiday card, send a party invitation, or just design a creative fun web page. You can then send a link to your page through e-mail or on your social networks. We created Special Delivery as one of the fun online games that we create each year.  You can play the other games on the Scott Design Holiday page.

Scott Design’s Special Delivery web application also won a Platinum International Marcom Award, a Silver Davey Award, a Bronze ADDY Award, and a Bronze Horizon Award. Special Delivery was a semifinalist in the 2009 Adobe MAX Awards.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Scott Design Awards page.

We’re getting into the holiday spirit at Scott Design and wanted to share some free games we’ve created: Special Delivery, Snowbash, Snowflake Designer, and the Virtual Fireplace.

Special Delivery: Create your own holiday-themed web pages

Design and share your own one-of-a-kind holiday pages in minutes with Special Delivery. You can make a holiday page, send birthday wishes, invite friends to a party, or create a page just for fun. Upload your own photos, include music, select from beautiful backgrounds and borders, add animations, and write messages. It’s a free, easy, green alternative to traditional cards! Create your holiday greetings.

Snowbash: Can you stop the snowmen?

See how many snowmen your gingerbread man can get without harming the innocent pink bunnies in the award-winning Snowbash game, Best-of-Show at last year’s Silicon Valley ADDY awards. Play Snowbash.

Snowflake Designer: Design your own beautiful flakes

Select the number of branches, the shape of the crystals and their complexity, and watch as your snowflake grows right outside your window! Make some snowflakes.

Virtual Fireplace: May your days be merry and bright

Just because you’re stuck at your computer doesn’t mean you can’t gaze into the hypnotic flames of a crackling fireplace. Have fun decorating the mantle for the holidays, or just kick back and imagine the warmth! Curl up by the fireplace.

Happy Holidays!

We hope you have a lot of fun and hope you share your Special Delivery online greetings, as well as the games, with friends and family.

All our wishes for a wonderful holiday season!