BreeRadloff.com » Design

Website Curb Appeal

Bree — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:14:21 +0000

What is Curb Appeal?

Curb Appeal is a term borrowed from the Real Estate industry that describes the instant impression that a buyer gets when pulling up to a house on the market. A good impression can cause someone to fall in love with a house before they’ve seen the inside. A bad impression might cause them to drive away without even stopping. Curb appeal can manifest itself the same way on your website, when a first-time visitor lands on your website and decides if it’s the right place or not. This article will discuss five things you can do to increase your website’s curb appeal.

Fresh and Relevant Content
Nothing kills curb appeal like a stagnant website. If someone arrives on your home page and the newest article is more than a few days old, they are already subconsciously downranking your website. I’m not suggesting that you publish content just for content’s sake. Useless content can have the same effect as obsolete content. What you might do is brainstorm some ideas and then rough out a schedule that returning visitors can become familiar with. They’ll come to know that you update at some regular interval and start to visit based on that.

Active Forums & Comments
It’s a viral effect, when a reader sees new comments, they are more prone to comment. It may be a cheap trick, but while your site is freshly launched, you would do well to aggressively solicit comments from friends, family and professional associates in the right circles.

Desired Content Up Featured Up Front
If you are a retailer, that means your top products. Your newest, best or most popular items – the items that most people are there to find – should be given special priority on your site. If you run a blog, it means new or popular articles displayed front and center, with an easy way to find articles that someone might reference.

A Design That Communicates Effectively
A user’s perception of your site is influenced by the design, but not wholly based upon it. A nice aesthetic may help communicate, but a sloppy design might also get in the way of your content. Keep in mind that almost nobody truly cares about the design of your site. People want the content.

Validation of Your Position as The Expert
If you want to be perceived as the expert, you’re going to have to do your part to grab that title and hold on to it. Although your site needs to stand on its own merits, a savvy marketing will also encourage growth and acceptance by promoting their site where applicable. Try going after some of these things as ways to establish yourself or your site as a leader:

Positive reviews from users and customers
Professional endorsements from market or industry peers
Client list, featured here or success stories
Guest authors, co-contributors and 3rd party content displayed on your site
Good press from 3rd party sources – “voted #1 tech site by webmonkey” etc
Award and Citation graphics

More reading on this topic:

13 characteristics of outstanding blog design

A Design’s Natural Habitat

Bree — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:21:30 +0000

Every step in the path to building a website involves conceptualizing your creation along increasingly realistic steps. By the time you are ready to lay down some serious pixels in Photoshop, you should be creating something that doesn’t just resemble the final product — it looks exactly like it. Fully designed and accurately proportioned, your deck of layouts is an exact description of what you intend to build.

By doing yourself the tiny favor of mocking up your concept in a browser frame you can also remove some frustrations that can ruin the zen of your design. By accounting for these early on, your site will remain strong, using available space wisely and working on a variety of platforms. You may not realize some of these until you mock up a website that is framed by its natural environment, so I’d like to mention some of the considerations.

The browser affects the user’s perception your website’s design and interface.
A monitor may be 1024×768 pixels; the resulting browser portal window is not.
The vertical scrolling track takes up space, and may not always be present
A user may configure their browser to use more or less space

The last added bonus of this is that you can manipulate these photoshop files to depict a browser of any size. If it’s helpful to show your site or application on a wide screen monitor, non-standard aspect ratio, or one that’s extremely small, you will want to demonstrate that to the project stakeholders. Often times, doing such excercizes will even help you catch something you may have missed. Errors such as primary content below the scroll or applications that don’t utilize the aspect ratio well will be exposed.

Feel free to download these photoshop templates to get you started in mocking up your designs in their natural habitat. I’ve provbided zip files that contain PSD’s of the following browsers:

Enjoy!

The Quality Triangle

Bree — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:23:31 +0000

The Quality Triangle is often joked about but seldom understood to be a real phenomenon. It is sometimes mentioned sarcastically by a dismayed project member when a client asks for a large task on a budget . There are very few absolute rules in life, but I feel that this axiom holds true across many professions and personal endeavors alike. Whether a client realizes it or not, you can’t have it fast cheap and good.

You can't have all three!

I wish I could say that any designer or developer should be able to find an elegant way to pull all three off, but I can’t. I’ve come to realize that clients can make requests that truly astonish me. Sometimes the request merely illustrates how a client can want to have their cake and eat it too, but once in a while you get a request that spotlights an individual’s complete separation from reality.

If you insist on exploring the truly wacky side of client interaction, the there are places that can illustrate this point rather sharply. Some of my favorites that I’ve saved from eLance:

“Need photo hosting, management and sharing site just like flickr. Budget: $1000″

“Do you want to create the next facebook?! Budget: $500″

“Dating website with social networking tools. Budget $500″