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How WordPress Took the CMS Crown from Drupal and Joomla

admin — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 20:48:56 +0000

According to W3Techs, almost 55% of the 1 million most visited websites that run on a content management system (CMS) are run on WordPres. WordPress is a darn fine CMS and is stable and easy to use, but so are Joomla and Drupal. So, why does WordPress have the lion’s share of the top 1 million websites?

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This article does not set out to prove that one CMS is “better” than another. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and dozens of other platforms are mature, stable, great CMS’ that can do a fantastic job in most cases.

MARKET SHARE

As a point of reference, at Gravity Switch, about 50% of our projects are in Drupal and about 35% in WordPress; the rest are in other CMS’ or written by hand in PHP or built on a framework such as CakePHP, DJango or Ruby. Some of you might be squirming in your seats asking, “But why don’t you just use [insert your CMS of choice]?” The answer is simple: blind luck.

Breakdown of websites with a clearly identifiable CMS, according to W3Tech’s survey of the top 1 million domains.

A couple of our top clients asked us to use Drupal or WordPress (based on their own technical requirements or preferences), so right now we have more in-house experience with WordPress and Drupal. Our job is to be flexible and to help our clients do their jobs better. While we’re able to guide folks who don’t have a preference, our job is not to evangelize one technology over another.

So, rather than attempt to convince you that one CMS is best, I’ll share some data that compares WordPress to Drupal and Joomla in order to understand how and why WordPress got the crown.

NAME RECOGNITION

When I want to understand how popular something is, one of the first places I go to is Google Trends. Based on WordPress’ market share, I expected to find that it is searched for about five times as often as Joomla and about nine times as often as Drupal.

What I found was quite different:

Global searches, as shown by Google Trends.

It turns out that, internationally, Joomla is almost as well known as WordPress, and Drupal is searched for about a quarter as often.

This data suggests that:

1. Out of the top three CMS’ out there (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal), people are choosing WordPress more often.
2. People are choosing WordPress without searching for it.

WHERE WORDPRESS EXCELS

Let’s be honest. It probably doesn’t matter which of the top 20 CMS’ you choose. (Curious what they are? W3Techs lists them.) They’re all reasonably secure, stable and easy to maintain. While WordPress might have been “just blogging software” for a time and didn’t have the features needed to be a true CMS, those days are gone. Anyone who says otherwise is trolling or living in the past.

In fact, the “SxSW Web Content Management System Showdown” a couple of years back clearly showed WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all to be powerful and expandable systems.

So, what does WordPress do differently than Joomla, Drupal and others?

1. Focus

Unlike Joomla and Drupal, which were designed as proper CMS’, WordPres was designed to solve a problem. Also, because WordPress had a clear target audience (bloggers), its developers were able to build a successful business at WordPress.com pretty much from day one.

The story of how WordPress established itself is simple: bloggers had problems, and WordPress provided services to fix those problems.

By contrast, Drupal and Joomla tried to be “everything a geek might need”. Alas, capitalism always wins. Having clearly defined uses is more effective than working in the abstract.

2. Ease of Use

Let’s face it: WordPress is the easiest CMS for a non-techie to install and set up, and the easiest to use of the gate. That counts for a lot.

Anyone can set up a blog on WordPress.com and can be up and running in a few hours. It’s easy enough that a 60-year-old IT employee can set up a company CMS without losing face for not being up to date on the newest technology. It’s easy enough that a hobbyist can start their own website or blog in a weekend. It’s easy enough that an old-school marketing firm can set up a website in house and, just as importantly, understand how to use it without reading pages of manuals.

WordPress is committed to serving non-technical users who want to communicate easily and effectively. So, its appeal makes sense when you consider that people who go into communications fields (including sales and marketing) tend not to be introverted technologists.

And because of its corporate ties, WordPress never had the luxury of being able to tell its users to RTFM, nor could it shrug and say, “It works for me.” Rather, the features of WordPress were driven by content people, not techies. Every feature had to be usable by bloggers, including non-technical ones.

Ease of use is an issue that both Joomla and Drupal are working on. But it doesn’t come naturally to them, evidenced by the slow progress they’re making and the fact that their ships are still being sailed by technologists. For example, Drupal still doesn’t even ship with a WYSIWYG editor. Unbelievable but true.

3. The Blog Factor

OK, I know that calling WordPress “blogging software” is taboo in the WordPress community. But before you hardcore aficionados get defensive about WordPress being “more than blogging software,” hear me out. The blog factor is a great strength that helped to establish WordPress as a CMS.

First, let’s admit that WordPress is great blogging software. Consider the following:

- WordPress.com is the 18th most visited website in the world. Its tagline is “A better way to blog,” and it claims to have “355,355 bloggers.” Quite simply, a lot of bloggers use WordPress.

- Of the new blog posts featured on WordPress.com’s home page, three out of eleven of the blogs run on their own domains, and one out of eleven or 9% is in the top 1 million websites, according to Alexia.

If we extrapolate this, we can say that approximately 9% of all WordPress.com blogs (or 34,000 blogs) are in the top 1 million websites.

Let’s put that into perspective.

According to W3Techs, 2.7% (27,000) of the 1 million most visited websites in the world run Joomla, and 1.7% (17,000 websites) run Drupal. That means that almost as many popular bloggers use WordPress.com-hosted websites as use Drupal and Joomla combined.

This doesn’t include people who have a custom installation of WordPress, only those with WordPress.com accounts!

Let’s slice that number differently. The graphs below show how many WordPress, Drupal and Joomla websites are dedicated blogs or news websites, compared to being straight CMS websites.

Percentage of most popular websites run on WordPress, Drupal and Joomla that are blogs or news-related.

Think about it. If the content of a website determines its popularity, then websites that offer news or blog posts will make up a sizeable percentage of the top million websites. A blogger or news provider understands by nature that content is more important than technology, so their ability to manipulate content will win out over “technical” features.

By plan or by luck, WordPress was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of the people who best understand how to communicate digitally.

It’s also worth noting that many of the top blogs in the world are technology-related. This is pretty relevant, because when websites such as SitePOint, Six Revisions and Smashing Magazine run on WordPress, their readers (i.e. people who are interested in Web technology) are more likely to use it, too. This gives WordPress a huge amount of built-in credibility, as well as the potential for a statistically significant editorial bias.

Estimated market share of blogs and websites running on WordPress.

Based on the above estimates, approximately 87,000 popular blogs or news websites run on WordPress, and 58,000 of the top million non-blog websites run on it, too.

To say, then, that WordPress is just blogging software is naive. Likewise, to say that WordPress is not blogging software is a big disingenuous. The reality is that WordPress is a very successful blogging platform, as well as the world’s most successful CMS. Three to five years ago, this might not have been true, but today no one could dispute it.

Going strictly by numbers, WordPress is more of a blogging platform than Joomla or Drupal are straight CMS’ – meaning that more WordPress blogs are out there than there are Joomla and Drupal websites combined.

I mention this because some people insist that WordPress is not just blogging software. But for 87,000 popular websites, it is. Getting defensive abput it would be silly. It would be like Apple saying that the iPhone isn’t a phone. It is a phone, even if it can be more than one.

And yet WordPress is also a CMS. Remember that 58,000 websites in the top 1 million are not blogs or news websites but are powered by WordPress. This means that, as a CMS, WordPress is 3.4 times as popular as Drupal, which means that anyone who says that WordPress isn’t a “real” CMS is smoking something strong.

WordPress’ pedigree as blogging software is a key part of its success as a CMS, for the following reasons:

1. Blogging helped it focus on usability. Designing a product to do a particular task is always more effective. Drupal and Joomla have always wanted to be expandable. WordPress has always wanted to be used by people. Drupal doesn’t even include a default WYSIWYG editor, because… um, why? It’s not like doing it would be expensive or a lot of work.

2. It had a clearer business model than the others, and 8.7% of the top communicators in the world could easily use it.

3. The platform gained instant credibility as soon as websites such as Engadget and Smashing Magazine started using it.

4. (And the point that is actually most important…) Bloggers know content. And the Web is all about content.

I’m not saying whether this was by luck or by plan, but if your goal 10 years ago was to create a technology that would be used on as many websites in the world as possible, and you approached it with the mindset that the Internet is about content, then you’d probably design the software writers who are interested in the Internet.

In other words, bloggers.

If your goal 10 years ago was to create a Web technology that would “take over the world,” you might try to get your technology used by as many of the most influential technology-related websites as you could.

In other words, bloggers.

If your goal today was to build a technology based on the single most enduring theme in Web design of the past 15 years, that principle would probably be “Content is king”. Savvy PR and marketing firms the world over are trying to figure out how to make their clients premier sources of information.

In other words, bloggers.

All that being said, I can appreciate why the WordPress community is trying to put less emphasis on its blogging pedigree. But a stronger message about WordPress is out there, which is that other CMS’ focus on the system, while WordPress is all bout the content.

WRAPPING UP

What this all boils down to is that content management systems perform a job for us, which is to manage content. Drupal does this. Joomla does this. WordPress does this. Judging by the market share of CMS’, WordPress just happens to do this very well and more often. WordPress undeniably runs more websites out there than any other competitors on the block.

But I also meant it earlier when I said that, in most cases, any of the top three (or even the top 20) CMS’ out there will do the job admirably well. Picking one CMS over another is usually determined by the IT department’s personal preference or by the core competency of the firm you are working with or by the platform of choice for peers in your industry.

This is a case study, and it shows that users will choose the tool that best solves their problem and gets the job done. In this case, users are developers and content creators, and when they need to get things done, they want the tool that is right for the job, that is easiest to use and that gives them the best experience.

7 Mistakes to Avoid on Your E-Commerce Site

admin — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:12:21 +0000

We’ve all been there. You’re all set to buy something, credit card in hand, but for one reason or another you never close the deal.

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Maybe the third time you were asked to enter your credit card number you gave in. Perhaps it was the exorbitant shipping costs. Maybe the site crashed.

The truth is, there are at least seven things that send potential customers fleeing in horror from your website, some of which were chronicled in this perceptive comic from The Oatmeal. If you actually want people to stick around and buy stuff from your site, you may want to take note and avoid these common pitfalls.

1. YOUR SITE IS TOO SLOW

Every 2 seconds of load time on your site equals an 8% abandonment rate, according to Gomez, the application monitor from Compuware. If you drop your load time from 8 seconds to 2 seconds, your conversion rate actually jumps 74%.

It’s easy to see why: Do you want to waste your time waiting for a site to load?

Unfortunately there are a lot of reasons why your site is loading so slowly. Steve Tack, Chief Technical Officer for Compuware, says many e-commerce sites are overloaded with third-party plug-ins for Facebook, Twitter and ad networks – all of which can slow a site down. Another cause is cloud issues: If you’re using a content-delivery network (CDN), your site can slow to a crawl if your service provider is having issues.

2. YOUR SITE IS TOO COMPLICATED

If you’re asking consumers to take more than five steps to buy something off y0ur site, then you’re asking too much. Compuware recommends the following:

- Welcome/cart contents page
- Bill-to-section
- Ship-to section
- Payment module
- Confirmation/thank you page

3. YOUR CREDIT CARD ENTRY SYSTEM IS PUNISHING

Here you may also want to take The Oatmeal’s advice about credit card entry fields. Is there anything more frustrating than entering your name, address, 16-digit credit card number and three-digit security code, and then restarting from scratch because you forgot your ZIP code? And yes, if most of your business is in the U.S., why not put the country first on the scroll instead of way down at the end, as it would appear alphabetically?

Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with Forrester Research, says that there’s a standard sequence of information for credit card information. If you mess with that order (by putting the credit card number before the name and address, for instance), then users are apt to enter the wrong info because they’ve been trained to log such data in a certain sequence. Says Mulpuru: “Follow the industry standard.”

4. YOU’RE CHARGING TOO MUCH FOR SHIPPING

Mulpuru says that if you’re charging more than 10% of the total cost of the item for shipping, then you’re charging too much. “You’re probably depressing your sales significantly,” she says. “People are more likely to abandon your cart.”

5. YOU’RE OVERSELLING YOUR TABLET APP

If a potential customer visits your website on her iPad, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s keen on downloading your iPad app. “Don’t over-invest in customizing your mobile apps,” says Mulpuru. “Unless there’s a clear value, most people figure, ‘Why bother?’”

An alternative is to optimize your site for the tablet experience, something that few are doing right now, Tack says.

6. YOUR SITE PERFORMS HORRIBLY ON CERTAIN BROWSERS

You may be a Google Chrome fan, but there’s a world full of people who are using old versions of Internet Explorer. Have you tested your site on those other browsers? “Many sites don’t perform well across various browsers,” says Mulpuru, “so people abandon them.”

7. YOU’RE HITTING YOUR CUSTOMERS WITH IRRELEVANT OFFERS

OK, you’ve completed the sale. This person has indicated that they’re indicated that they’re interested in what you’re selling, so it’s natural to conclude that they might want to buy something from you in the future. So why not hit them with offers for things that they’re actually likely to buy?

Mulpuru recalls, for instance, that after she bought a bed from Costco, the retailer besieged her with offers for … more beds. While deals on pillows or sheets might have made sense, a bed is something you generally purchase every five or 10 years. Says Mulpuru: “At this point, I’m not in the market for more beds.”

What peeves you about e-commerce sites? Let us know in the comments.

Top 5 Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make

admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 02:53:51 +0000

If you’re a small business owner, your website is the central hub of your company, and it’s a pivotal part of your marketing and branding.

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Potential customers visit your site specifically for its content, meaning its appearance and usability are critical to its success and how those users view your company. However, getting your web design wrong can have a negative impact on your business.

Here are 5 common web design mistakes you must avoid to create a great user experience and grow your bottom line.

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1. Poor Navigation

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Many small businesses fail to make navigation a priority, but without careful attention to how people navigate your site, you could unintentionally be creating a frustrating experience for any potential visitor. People visit your site for specific information, and if they cannot find it they will quickly go elsewhere, leaving with the impression that your business is disorganized in more than just its website.

A good navigation structure should be seamless and will keep visitors on your site longer, which means potentially more readers, subscribers, sales or leads – whichever is your primary objective.

Website navigation affects both usability and accessibility, so it’s important to make it a primary concern. Most websites and blogs use common navigational techniques that are expected by the average visitor. The pages and sections of the site should be easy and logical for visitors to maneuver. Don’t make your visitors think about how to navigate your site; it should be effortless and natural.

There are several principles you can follow to create an effective navigation structure:

- Use icons to aid navigation. they’re both visually appealing and easy to use and understand

- Use logical groups of related links, with the most important links on the top-level navigation bar and functional (dashboard, account, settings, etc.) and legal (copyright, privacy, terms) located elsewhere.

- Provide location information so users know where they are on any given page and how to proceed to another area of the website. This can be achieved by using Breadcrumb navigation.

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2. No Clear Calls To Action

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The fundamental error of many small business websites is the lack of a clear call to action. We’ve all seen bland small-business brochure website with nothing but endless descriptive paragraphs. If you aren’t leading users to commit to an action (buy a product, contact you or subscribe, for example), then you are losing them.

Driving traffic to your website is important, but that traffic is useless if your primary call to action is a plain “click here” link buried in a sea of text. Call-to-action buttons are a great way to grab the user’s attention, and these buttons can be the key to higher conversions. Investing time and consideration into creating successful calls to action can help guide users and address their needs while achieving your own business goals.

It’s important to keep the following best practices in mind when creating an optimal call to action:

- The design of a call to action can be broken down into 4 simple elements – size, shape, color, and position. Each plays a vital part in determining how effective the call to action is in directing the user.

- Don’t make your users work or think, or they’ll leave. It’s not that they aren’t smart, it’s that they want access to information quickly without spending unnecessary time searching for it.

- Don’t overdo it with multiple, competing calls to action of every page. Decide what your primary target is and then define a clear objective per page. Your content should have answered “What’s in it for me?” and your call to action should now answer, “What do I do now?”

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3. Color & Contrast

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Color and contrast aren’t usually high up on the list of priorities for a small business owner when it comes to creating a website. But it should be, because if your website text does not have sufficient contrast compared to its background, people will have difficulty reading your content, especially people with poor vision or color-blindness.

Aside from plain readability, color and contrast are important because they can be used to create visual interest and direct the attention of the user. It can equally be effective in organizing and defining the flow and hierarchy of a page, and it’s therefore an essential principle to pay attention during the design process. Here are some tips:

- Using a free Color Contrast tool (which conforms to accepted standards) you can easily check to see how the contrast on your website measures up.

- Research how major sites use color and contrast to improve readability and highlight specific sections, and use this knowledge to experiment with color schemes.

- One of the best ways to enhance contrast is by creating size differences between elements, making some things appear larger than others. This works especially well within a minimal color scheme, and it means you don’t have to necessarily rely on color.

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4. Content, Content, Content

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People visit your website for its content, and how that is structured is a huge factor in its success or failure. Unfortunately, an overwhelming number of small businesses get so caught up in overloading the user with information that they overlook how that information is presented.

Most people do not read unless it’s absolutely necessary, and they prefer to scan through information quickly to get to the points of interest. This is why it’s so important to establish a strong visual content hierarchy so users can quickly scan your site and sifting through relevant information. A logical content hierarchy also acts as a guide through each page and creates a more enjoyable user experience.

So when focusing on your content, it’s best to keep in mind these three tips:

- White space is possibly the most important factor to consider. It will allow the user to focus on the meaningful content within each section.

- Break up lengthy pieces of information into digestible blocks of text, utilizing headings, sub-headings, bullets, blockquotes and paragraphs.

- Readable content is important, so use a good line height that is large enough to make content scannable. Margins and letter spacing also need to be taken into consideration.

When talking about content, spelling and grammar cannot be underestimated.

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5. Clutter

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We all know at least one small business website that seems to include everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. Many small business owners tend to cram as much as they can onto a single page – the end result is a busy, cluttered and unreadable page.

The more extraneous items there are on a web page, the more unprofessional it looks, and it becomes overwhelming, confusing and distracting the user. A cluttered website will also affect traffic because visitors won’t return if they can’t understand or follow the content, which leads to low traffic, a high bounce rate and possibly a poor Page Rank.

Clutter also applies to images. Too many can be a huge distraction and just plain annoying. Images should be used to illustrate, capture attention and guide the user where required.

Follow these guidelines for a more streamlined visitor experience:

- Challenge every item on each page and ask, “Does it really need to be there? Does it serve a specific purpose? Can I live without it?”

- The key is to aid the visitor in finding the information they’re looking for, so make sure to differentiate between areas of content, advertisements and promotions.

- Prioritize your content and decide what is the most important to your visitor and potential customer – and sell it well.

Even the greatest content can become lost in a mess of words and graphics, so de-cluttering is essential.

These are just five web design mistakes that many small businesses make. What other mistakes have you noticed on small business websites?

The 8 Questions To Ask When Hiring an SEO Expert

admin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:21:59 +0000

So you’ve finally decided that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for your business. You have heard for far too long that SEO is a great deal compared to print advertisements (up to $40,000/month) or banner ads ($10,000/month) on major sites. You’ve done the research and you know the opportunity is there–however there is one problem. There is too little time in the day and you need to focus on running your business.

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You’ve decided that you need to hire an SEO expert to help you bring more traffic and conversions to your website. The question is:

What kind of questions do you need to ask yourself when evaluating SEO Candidates?

1. Can they provide any case studies or examples of sites they have worked on?

Asking this question immediately gives you a glimpse into their ‘portfolio’, so to speak. Web designers and developers have their portfolios. Expert SEO professionals should have a portfolio ready to show you, and their Elance portfolio is the perfect place to display it. In addition to samples, they s hould be able to discuss why each project was a success and what methodology they used to attain success. If the portfolio look unimpressive or the candidate has a hard time explaining their methods to you, that should be a red flag.

2. Do they have their own sites? What is an example of a recent success and why do they consider it a success?

Asking this question gives you insight into other skills the candidate might have, such as affiliate marketing, paid search, web design, web development, WordPress expertise, and more. This is a great gauge to see just how valuable they can be to your company. Ensuring that they have examples and why they consider each site a success is important to seeing their different approach to websites and whether it is a fit for your business or not.

3. What is the biggest mistake they have made with SEO and what have they learned from it?

All SEO professionals have made a mistake at one point or another and it is important to see what mindset they developed after making that particular mistake. For example, when I first started with SEO, I mistakenly thought that a keyword was getting 10,000 searches a month when it was in fact only getting roughly 900 searches a month. This only happened because I did not know that it was important to switch from ‘broad’ match to ‘exact’ match when doing keyword research. I unwittingly optimized for that keyword and took three months before I realized my fatal mistake. Go me! I now understand that for the most part, I should be using ‘exact’ match when doing keyword research.

4. What tools do they use?

Tools are important for any SEO professional-they help uncover important metrics and great opportunities in a fraction of the time it would take if you did it manually. If the professional isn’t using any tools and they are claiming to be an expert, that should be a red flag. Some popular tools that SEO pros use are SEOmoz, Raven Tools, and SEO Powersuite. There are many more but that’s a post for another time.

5. If their proposal is chosen, are they willing to do a set list of tasks to be completed in the next 72 hours?

This will help you uncover a few things:

- How serious they are: If they really want you as a client, they’ll gladly accept this task to prove their worth to you.

- What their process is like: Is this how you want SEO done on your site?

- How well do they communicate: Is the level of communication acceptable? The tasks that you assign don’t have to be very complex. It can be as simple as asking them to do keyword research or a competitive analysis for you. You just want to see if you are comfortable with their style of work.

6. What is their #1 rule when it comes to SEO?

This question gives you more insight into how they think. You might get an interesting answer every now and then.

7. How does their Job History look?

Were their past clients happy with the quality of their work? What type of work did the SEO expert do on his site? Would they do business with him again?

8. Do they offer any guarantees?

This is a trick question-on the end, the candidate wants your business so they might answer yes just to get you to sign. However, offering any guarantees should be a red flag-even if the candidate has had a perfect track record. No one controls the search algorithms except for the search engines themselves. However, offering estimates is a good alternative.

Keep in mind that this is not the end-all and be-all list of SEO interview questions-but I guarantee they’ll help you cover useful tidbits of information about your prospective candidates! I hope this helps and I wish you the best in growing your website online!

About the Author
Eric Siu is the Director of Business Development at Evergreen Search, an online marketing agency in Los Angeles that specializes in search engine optimization. Eric also blogs on topics such as Black Hat vs White Hat SEO. Evergreen Search is focused on bringing effective, long lasting online marketing solutions to remarkable business that want to get better. You can find him on Twitter at @ericosiu.

Fluidity Of Content And Design: Learning From Where The Wild Things Are

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:04:14 +0000

as read on

Have you read Where the Wild Things Are? The storybook has fluidity of content and design figured out.

It goes that one night, protagonist Max “wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind or another.” He hammers nails into walls, pesters a small dog. Author Maurice Sendak doesn’t explain these hijinks textually for the reader. The mischievous acts are illustrated on the right-hand pages. Readers make the narrative connections for themselves.

The words and pictures depend on each other for completeness. Web designers can employ the same complementary dependence of graphic and text in their own work. It encourages a sense of belonging and can create strong first impressions, which are often essential to effective Web design. Because Web design is not confined to page-by-page display as storybooks are, we’ve got no excuse for neglecting Curt Cloninger’s assertions that a design “has to somehow be relevant to the content, accurately representing its purposes in the medium,” and that “the content has to be useful to the site’s audience.”

This post explains four strategies for improving fluidity of content and design, and we’ll gauge the effectiveness with which several websites use these strategies, taking special note of what we can learn from Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

With Graphics As Your Witness

When editing critical papers during my undergrad, I was constantly mindful of backing up every claim I made in writing. Describing a protagonist as “yearning for a return to childhood” wasn’t enough to convince a professor unless I could refer to a passage where this was suggested.

Though published way back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen’s analysis in “How Users Read the Web” still offers a storehouse of relevant advice about how users gauge legitimacy online. He suggests that when businesses use promotional language online, they create “cognitive burdens” on their users, slowing down their experience with the website, triggering a filter by which they weigh fact against fiction.

Instead, use design to complement or convey self-promotion, easing user skepticism from the get-go.

Makr Carry Goods effectively “backs up” its content with graphics to convince users of the “news”-worthiness of its work. In the example below, the visual promotion of the products complements the text: without having to scroll over the images, we see the products themselves as being the news.

Scrolling over the images on top reveals the textual “news”:

From there, users can carry on their visual journey through the Mark Carry catalogue, enticed to read on by the persistent connection between the product and the news section, a connection that compels users to explore further.

Key to this graphic-textual connection is the visual quality of the products themselves. Without the clean white presentation and professional style, the visuals here might fail to suggest a connection with the news. But the products have been presented to impress.

Without engaging visual confirmation, content will often fail to persuade.

Take Mark Hobbs’ professional website:

He claims that he’s “not normal.” He’s “extraordinary… adaptable, loyal, ambitious and an Eagle Scout,” and he’s “like a sponge” (among other things). If he were getting points for descriptiveness, Hobbs would take first place. But he’s got no visual evidence of any of these claims. No hint at this lack of normalcy.

Besides, as Nielsen’s studies suggest, users generally dislike “marketese”: writing that is boastful, self-promotional and full of subjective claims. Then again, should claiming not to be normal be considered a boast?

Mark’s claims could have been justified by an impressive and immediate visual display of his past work. Engaging users with the strict facts of his expertise could have reinforced his textual claims.

Consider the home page of Rally Interactive:

It is “here to help you build digital things.” We know this because of the two immediate examples of its work, presented in triangles that recall other projects that required exceptional skill: the pyramids.

Rally’s folio effectively demonstrates a strategy of fluid content and design. The firm backs up its claim and provides users with an immediately useful and positive association. The visual and verbal prompts coalesce to convince users of Rally’s expertise.

Going back to Where the Wild Things Are, if Sendak hadn’t included visuals of Max’s misdoings, what sympathy could we gain for him as his mother sends him up to bed? We can interpret his “mischief” any way we choose, but Sendak’s visual direction helps us gauge what kind of protagonist (or antagonist) Max will be for the remainder of the story. Verbal prompts simply wouldn’t cut it.

Fluid content and design reduce the user’s search time and, in this case, justify the claims made textually. Users don’t have the time or willingness to hunker down and read, particularly when looking for a service. Fluid content and design convince users of the truth of a claim before they even begin to question it.

Tighten Up

Once you’ve eliminated any refutable claims, you might find your content looking a bit sparse. In fact, you want it naked: easy to scan and to the point.

Christine Anameier’s article “Improving Your Content’s Signal-to-Noise Ratio” points us in the right direction for creating tight content that isn’t afraid to depend on suggestive design to share the workload. There will always be information that the user cannot process visually. So, what should you put in text?

Anameier suggests segmentation, prioritization and clear labeling to make the most of your content.

SEGMENTATION

Segmentation entails sectioning content on the page according to audience or task.

The home page for Jessica Hische’s design portfolio does this effectively:

The home page targets the specific needs of users. Hische has divided the links to her services according to what particular users will be looking for, sparing us long descriptions of each service.

Hische also spares us a textual description of the quality of her service, instead pairing tight layout of text with sprawling, confident design. We can gather from the background a sense that she has clean organization. The orange ribbon font “welcomes” us and puts us at ease so that the text doesn’t have to.

PRIORITIZATION

Prioritization, as Anameier says, requires that you “understand your audiences and their tasks, and decide what your website is trying to do.” Structure your website to reflect these tasks, removing any content that strays from the path. Hische’s home page demonstrates a comprehension of her users’ purpose for visiting the website, and it wastes no words.

Content and design fluidity entails deciding what should be explained textually and what should be demonstrated graphically. Hische does not verbally boast about her quality of service. The design does that for her, conveying an array of positive attributes, from classic taste to proficient organization.

Hische recognizes that the first priority of users is not whether she’s any good, but whether she offers what they need. Once that is clarified, users will look into the quality. Keyword: look.

Creating those fluid user experiences in which content and design cohere requires, as Mark Boulton states in “A Richer Canvas,” “text that feels connected to the physical form in a binding manner that should make it invisible.” Anameier herself says that incorporating “specific and accurate link text, page titles and headings” gives users the luxury of perusing graphic elements on the page without being disrupted by navigation obstacles.

LABELING

Labeling that is structured with the user’s goals in mind will be trim and to the point, “invisible,” as Boulton suggests, so that the visual showcase enjoys some attention, too.

Tight content that follows Anameier’s guidelines will visually suggest your service’s qualities and attributes strongly. The description of the service itself will rely heavily on text, but what sets your service apart from others can be conveyed visually. Creating cohesive visual and textual discovery paths for users replicates that same sense of control that users get from the storybook.

Doodle Pad superbly utilizes segmentation, prioritization and clear labeling on its “About” page:

Carrying over the sketch-book theme to its visuals, Doodle Pad sets down user goals with clarity, displaying information directed at clients and creative professionals.

The labelling is clear and styled with familiar doodling motifs that show the user where to look for what they need. Key questions are answered, and the word count is not too shabby for a software concept.

Impressively, Doodle Pad connects the imagery and layout to the overall concept without over-informing or weighing down users with elaborate language. It gives us notebook-style notes for a notebook concept: tight and user-friendly.

Check The Narrative Voice

Curt Cloninger’s article “A Case for Web Storytelling” argues for narrative voice as being an essential consideration for Web designers who want to create engaging user experiences.

Designers are at a great advantage when it comes to synthesizing text with graphics. We can create a rich narrative tone that convinces and directs users. We are able to explore and experiment with the Web’s possibilities, going beyond Where the Wild Things Are and celebrating non-linear narratives, incorporating several kinds of interactive media.

With Web design, narrative voice need not stay put in the text. It’s more flexible that in storybooks, and Cloninger encourages us to play with that.

For instance, look at the layout for MailChimp 5.2. Toying with slogans that would look out of date on another Web page, the designers evoke nostalgia with their use of background images, color and typography, elements ripe with narrative potential:

Viewers interpret the slogans the right way because of the text’s ironic connection to the design. The “real people behind all those email addresses,” is a wink from the designers, because the viewers recognize that the “real people” in the background don’t look very “real” at all.

Users will commit to a fluid narrative online if the design fully commits to the content. And as Cloninger says, using narrative voice through Web design presents countless possibilities for exploration.

MailChimp explores one such possibility with its demo video, complete with more “wholesome” design and content:

Users can expect to be led on this retro journey through the other formats for narrative voice, as the video suggests with its old-school film-reel introduction.

The narrative voice is so woven into the content and design that MailChimp 5.2 could offer all kinds of 1950s-terrific claims and users would be moved to follow along.

MailChimp 5.2 experiments with tailoring content and design to a narrative voice, but it is effective because of its consistency. If it hadn’t committed to a particular narrative style, then the escapist spell of this user experience would have been broken.

Green Tea Design has chosen a watery, traditional Japanese-inspired design for its website. A geisha shades herself with an umbrella, looking down meekly, making for a quiet non-confrontational effect. But look at the aggressive text: “We don’t design wimpy websites that get sand kicked in their face by the competition.” The text goes on the offence, but the design doesn’t align with or enhance the narrative voice.

Try this: choose one adjective with which you’d like users to describe your website. Affix a sticky note of this adjective to the top of your monitor, and measure every sentence on your website against this adjective. Ask yourself whether the content aligns with the adjective. Now pour over your design and assess it by the same measure. We’re looking for matching sensibilities. Does your content and design align with how you want users to feel about the website?

In Where the Wild Things Are, the narrative tone is the anchor in Max’s hectic journey. Consistent, calm and matter of fact, even when Max is off dancing with the wild things, the voice elicits the reader’s trust as it sees the protagonist back to safety.

Readers settle into this consistency the way Max settles into his boat for “in and out of weeks / and almost over a year / to where the wild things are,” and again “back over a year / and in and out of weeks / and through a day.” It steadies the commotion in Max’s imagination.

Here, readers recognize the tension between the consistent content and the disruptive visuals as the mark of a superbly imaginative journey, where anything can happen, but where eventually everyone must return home.

The narrative commits to this tension until the end, when Max gets back to his room, where dinner is waiting for him, “and it was still hot.”

As a children’s storybook, Where the Wild Things Are doesn’t employ multiple forms of narrative expression. But it is an effective example of the co-dependence of playful and experimental text and visuals, in which the narrative voice incites chaos and calms the senses at the same time.

One last example of a committed narrative voice:

Recalling Gold Rush-era drama and Victorian carnival sights with its effective design elements, Forefathers maintains an adventurous tone, employing text that is consistent, descriptively appropriate and authentic.

Be Mindful Of The User Experience

As Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare state in “Making Up Stories: Perception, Language and the Web,” as Web users scan pages, they are “filling in the gaps-making inferences, whether they’re based on past experience… or elaborate associations drawn from our imaginations.”

Trust the user to connect the graphics and text, and expect them to want to. Cloninger says that “the more power a user has to control the narrative himself, the more a visitor will ‘own’ that narrative.”

Keep the descriptions visual. The acts of “mischief” in Where the Wild Things Are are graphic. The connection is made when both elements are harmonized into one idea. The user will be willing to read the text and view the corresponding image if both elements are compelling.

Looking at Jonathan Patterson’s effective online portfolio, we can see he has maintained a fluidity of content and design by basing the user’s experience on the motif of “fresh meat”:

Patterson’s “About” page looks like a steakhouse menu. The text on the first page hints at a description of a meal, while suggesting the page’s function. The website can be flipped through like a menu, giving the user choice and control. The text is simple and linear, mirroring the sequence of appetizer, main course and dessert in a restaurant menu. Fluid text and design help Patterson to create a particular experience with his portfolio.

Maurice Sendak employs similar tactics in Where the Wild Things Are, encouraging readers to expand their gaze to match Max’s ever-growing visual landscape. As Max moves out of his room and onto the sea, the content on the right-hand pages (otherwise bordered in thick white space) creeps over gradually, thrusting more colors onto the facing page. At one point, a sea monster appears on the left-hand page, which was otherwise reserved for text and white space.

Here is the user experience at its most polished. The change comes quietly, invisibly, but the reader is aware that something is different. The protagonist’s growth has been connected with the reader’s experience of the narrative through the placement and cohesion of text and image.

Another polished example of fluidity in content and design can be found in an actual restaurant’s website layout:

Yes, Denny’s. Look familiar? Replicating the experience of perusing a Denny’s menu, this layout shows how, in Patrick Lynch’s words, “visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the Web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and the brain.”

The user controls the narrative here, with fluid navigation options that maintain the menu-like aspect of the layout, and a pleasing visual presentation that, as Lynch says, “enhances usability.” Filling in the gaps between glancing over a Denny’s menu and browsing the website, users feel encouraged to control their experience.

Conclusion

Fluidity of content and design requires that you trust users to make connections. By making the tone consistent, backing up your claims, tightening the text and being sensitive to the user’s experience, you can be assured that users will draw the conclusions you want them to draw. Designers of promotional Web projects can learn these lessons in part from storybooks such as Where the Wild Things Are, which demonstrates the essential elements of user control and delight. Trust your inner child; it won’t steer you wrong.

Written by Sarah Bauer

As content strategist and industry blogger at Navigator Multimedia, Sarah Bauer foresees an exciting gold rush of writing opportunities for herself and others online. Currently working on an e-book aimed at helping small businesses get a start online, Sarah also enjoys writing music reviews and seeing as much live sound as possible while living in Vancouver.

Easier Is Better Than Better

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:20:58 +0000

as read on

In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice.

“People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.”

Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you, when in reality humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate. Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision. Politicians are rarely elected based on the majority of people doing research on their background and the policies they support. They are elected for the fact that people can relate to the message they are spreading and because we have heard of them before.

When it comes to our own designs, we imagine people being able to make informed decisions on what the next step should be. However, they are already making 400+ decisions throughout the rest of the day that are likely more important than what they will deal with in our design.

Do you think most people realize there are benefits to driving a manual transmission car over an automatic? Do you think they care? Automatic is easier to pick up so why bother with any other choice? How often do we stay in relationships that we shouldn’t, simply because it’s easier to just deal with it than face the repercussions of having to confront the person?

Have you ever been to In ‘N Out Burger? I’ve heard great stories about this place and their mythical burgers and fries. The catch behind this place is that they have a very limited menu. You order a Double Double, cheeseburger or hamburger. You can add fries, milkshake and beverage to that if you wish. That’s all of your options (unless you know about the secret menu). Now, I’ve been there and tasted their food and it’s good, but it is not much different than Wendy’s. The appeal of the place is that your choices are limited. It’s easy to order there because you don’t have to decide which type of chicken sandwich you feel is the best option for you. In ‘N Out makes the fast food experience easy for you. Having it your way is not the way we want.

In ‘N Out is known for their very limited menu. Too many choices are distracting and require more time for making a final decision what to order.

Woot.com is an online store with a twist. Instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of items, you are offered only one item a day. If you like it, you buy it and if you don’t, you wait until tomorrow to see what is going to show up. The site is successful and yet the logic of it all seems backwards. However, if I’m running a store, does it really matter whether I’m selling 100 units of 1 item or 100 different items for 1 unit at a time? Woot makes the shopping experience easy by making our choice simply “yes” or “no”.

How much less fun would Angry Birds be if you had to select the birds you could use before each level? Taking away that choice and letting us focus on how to use the birds we are given makes the game much more enjoyable.

By not choosing which bird to play with in each level, one can focus more on how to use them.

How many of your friends choose to buy a computer for their home simply because they use the same one at work? Since they have been using it at work, it has become easy for them to use. Doesn’t mean it is the better computer — it is simply the one that is easiest for them. Our selections don’t have to be the best choices — they just have to be ones that we are okay with.

How often do you come across a site that offers you better features than their competitors, but they aren’t as easy to use. There is no reason to switch over to a service that is harder to use even if they have more features. If the features aren’t there to make my life easier then what good does the service do me?

Back when image hosting was cool, the sites that won were the ones that allowed you to upload an image without having to register or login. You simply uploaded your image and you were done. Imgur is a great example of this and has now become one of the most popular image hosting sites in the world. That doesn’t mean sites like Flickr couldn’t thrive — they just had to work much harder to achieve more users and show that going through the hassle of registering was indeed worth it.

User Settings And Choice

In a recent article, Jared Spool did a study that found that only 5% of users changed their default settings in MS Word. Being a computer nerd, this surprised me because I like to dive into the settings of all of my applications to see what I can tweak. The large majority of people don’t seem to want to tweak though — they just want to use the application:

“We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.”

It is great to provide the user with the ability to make changes, but settings aren’t a must-have feature. Building a great product that just works should be priority number one and once you begin to understand what settings might be tweaked, should you then start to think about adding a settings panel.

Users assume you are giving them the settings that are best for them right off the bat. If you aren’t, then they might view your product as a failure.

The Paradox Of Choice

The paradox of choice says that the more options available to an individual, the harder it becomes to make a selection. For example, if there are free samples of jam being given out at the store, you are more likely to get people to buy a jar of jam when only six selections are available as opposed to 24. More choices don’t make the selection process easier for people, but having no choices takes away some of the freedom they believe they have.

According to Barry Schwartz, it is much easier to find your pair of crocs if there are fewer color options available.

When deciding on which of the new iPhones you should get, you can either get it in black or white and three different memory options. Add in multiple carriers though and the choice starts to become a little more complicated.

If a client tells you that you can do their design any way you choose, it is more difficult than having to do a design with constraints because your options are endless. We need constraints, limited choices, to be built into everything that we do. This makes decision making easier and the benefit of this is an easier design to use.

If somehow you can make the easiest product and the best product in the industry, you have yourself a winner. You have to consider how many choices we are given daily so it’s in your best interest to limit the ones your customers have to make because there is a good chance it isn’t the most important decision of the day for them.

What this means is that the design that is easiest to evaluate (less options to choose from) will win most of the time. Make your copy straight to the point. Don’t waste your time on graphics that don’t drive the point home. Funny t-shirts and bumper stickers are effective because they are easy to evaluate. I have a hard enough time picking my outfit in the morning — don’t make me try to decide which one of the 250 default avatars I should use.

Written by Paul Scrivens
Paul Scrivens is a passionate designer who runs the Drawar design community and is the Product Designer at (mt). He loves design. He loves learning. He loves being wrong. That last one was a lie. Be sure to follow him on Twitter.