The problem with the information overload of the internet is that website readers get lazy. When they come in from search engines, they often click, find what they’re looking for and head off in another direction.

However, if you give them better reasons to click, they’re more likely to keep digging.

There’s doing it right, and there’s doing it the right way

A few years ago, a little site called Men’s Health saw an astounding 78.3% increase in page views simply by adjusting their article navigation and breaking up stories into sections, where the user needed to click “next” to continue reading.

Not bad, right?

On the other end of things, a publisher we watch that typically gets 2.8 million unique visitors per month dropped a whopping 59% in page views in the past year. This was directly after consolidating long articles into slideshows and transforming their news-centric homepage into a Pinterest look-alike.

However, this isn’t to say that images and slideshows don’t work, it’s just about doing them right.  Better Homes and Gardens website saw a 21% increase in page views back when they introduced slideshows. The difference between the two examples is that BHG never writes a fifty-word slideshow snippet without inter-linking at least once, but usually three to five times.

How you can get people to keep on clicking

If you’re ad-driven, getting people to click more is a need-to-know. But even if you’re in direct sales, you can really build rapport with a visitor just through a few pages. Here are some ideas:

1. Use featured images - A great image can supplement an otherwise boring or uninteresting headline.

2. Add related posts to your page - The most basic way to get more clicks is to include a list of related articles below your feature. Typically these are chosen based on similar tags.

3. Open external links in a new window: This is a general rule in terms of keeping people on your site, but it’s especially important for keeping your technical bounce rate low.

4. Be what they’re looking for: If you get a lot of traffic on a keyword, but have a high bounce rate, then you’re probably not answering their question. Revise high-bounce articles to make them more helpful and inter-link them to related topics so that visitors will be more likely to keep browsing.

5. Give something away for free: We always promote a free report through text ads right in the middle of our articles. What better way to keep people engaged than to give them something for free?

6. Make your editors superstars: Too many websites don’t have author pages, even though visitors often want to read more about the people who are writing the articles. Include a photo and a link to your author’s bio.

7. Interlink articles: It’s possible to  link to yourself too much in an article, but as long as you’re linking to related articles, your users will want to click to find out more.

8. Create a glossary: By creating a glossary, you can easily link to any words that are industry jargon. That way nobody is clicking away to Google any funny words. At Mequoda, we also add related articles to our glossary landing pages.

9. Write index posts: Write resource or “best of” lists often so you can frequently refer back to old articles that could use a boost. SEO is the best way to recycle old content, and index posts are the next best way! They also make it easy for lazy visitors to click!

10. Add a search box: If people can’t find what they’re looking for, why would they stay and click?

And one more thing…

If you need another good reason to get people to keep clicking, let’s look at our good friend SEO.

Google’s algorithm pays close attention to bounce rates on the search results that they list. If someone clicks a link in their results and immediately hits the back button and comes back to the results page to click on another article, Google takes notice.

Too many bounces from your listing can cause Google to drop you deeper and deeper into their results. So it’s important that when someone clicks on your article in a search engine, you keep them on your page for a little while.

If your website architecture needs a second eye, schedule a strictly no-obligation call with us to discuss your situation and needs. Call our Member Services Manager at (866-713-1005) or email. We look forward to discussing your needs and seeing how our experience, best practices, and programs can work for you.

Last year we discovered and shared a lot of web design tools that we use and want to pass on. In case you’re new here or missed a few, here are our favorites.

Website Colors

If you’re redesigning your website, or simply enjoy the art of color, consider these popular website color schemes and the tools that helped develop them.

• ColourLovers: A site dedicated to complementary color palettes. Their website trends section can tell you all of the most popular color palettes on the web right now and offer endless inspiration.

• Color Scheme Designer 3: Allows you to create your own complementary color palettes.

• Color Blind Filter: Look at your site through the eyes of someone who is colorblind. This perspective can really help you identify where your site lacks contrast.

A/B Testing

Website testing ensures that you’re always getting the most of all the SEO and content work you put into attracting website visitors.

• Google Content Experiments: To say that Google Content Experiments (GCE) is a very basic A/B tester would be an understatement. But its simplicity is also what makes it so great. Within Google Analytics, you assign which page from your live website you’d like to test within the GCA dashboard. Then you can add up to six different variations to be tested. There are plenty of good paid A/B testing tools too,  like Unbounce and Optimizely.

• CrazyEgg Heatmaps: CrazyEgg creates a heatmap of where users click on a particular page. The more they click the redder the area will be in heatmap. It’s an excellent tool to see where people are clicking on your site. You can test order form positions, advertisements, new content, and any kind of clickable area. You can see which navigation buttons they use, too. After enough visitors come to your site, you’ll know what’s hot and what’s not. On the same note, there are lots of cool heat-tracking tools you can use like ClickHeat and Click Density.

• Visual Website Optimizer: Similarly, this tool allows you to create multiple versions of your website and define what you want your visitors to do,  and then it splits your website traffic among the different versions and selects the best performing site. This tool’s website boasts over 10,000 users, including major companies like Microsoft and Groupon.

Website Review

Outside opinion is valuable. Two of the following tools are automated and can give you everything you need to know about where your website needs tweaking.

• HubSpot’s Marketing Grader: This tool will take you through the funnels of your website and tell you where you dropped the ball. It will tell you if you blog too much, or too little, whether you’re missing crucial social media elements on the site, and more obscure things like whether your headlines are too long.

• SEOMoz: SEOMoz has an On-Page Keyword Optimization tool (among many other great tools) that will basically create a report that tells you how good you are at SEO on any given page. Monthly membership starts at $99/mo but they do offer a 30-day trial. SEOMoz is cool because they keep buying companies that have created self-analysis tools for SEO and Social to add to their toolbox.

• Mequoda Website Scorecard: Our Website Homepage Ideas white paper gives away the scorecard and grading criteria we use to analyze all of our client and competitor sites.

Prototyping

As recently as 2006, we were still building paper prototypes with paper and cardboard – now we have web apps!

• Omnigraffle: Great cross-platform software tool for creating wireframes, and comes with an iPad version for prototyping on the go. Only available for Mac.

• ScratchPad:  It hasn’t publicly launched yet, but this tool is sort of the Pinterest of web design tools. Anytime you visit a website where you like the way a button looks, or how a headline is styled, or a call-to-action is placed, you can clip those elements and store them. When you’re re-designing your website or making updates, you can look back at all the smart design decisions you liked.

• Pencil: This is an open-source, cross-platform tool for website prototyping, including mobile prototypes.

Typography

The fonts you choose need to be readable and serve the theme that you’re working towards.

• CSS Type Set: This helpful tool allows you to paste copy into the text box, then select the font, size, color, and special formatting options. Then you can view the CSS version of it immediately to the right.

• TypeKit: This tool is for using fonts on your website that aren’t typically found on the web. Fonts are loaded through your stylesheet and the tool allows visitors on any platform or browser to see them correctly.

• WhatTheFont: When you see a font you like, but can’t figure out what it is, this tool allows you to upload a screenshot of the font. Or, you can answer a series of questions about different letters and it usually can figure it out for you.

Website Speed

Your website should load in three to five seconds, and that includes the stylesheet files that illustrate the fonts, colors, styles and structure of your website.

• CSS Compressor: This tool compresses your CSS so it’ll load quicker and save on bandwidth.

• Pingdom: This tool will test your full website page by loading the complete HTML page, including objects such as images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes. The tool then acts like a web browser and loads the page to tell you how fast or slow it loads.

• Google’s PageSpeed: You’ll have to sign up for an invite, but PageSpeed “fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.” As of today, the current service is free to webmasters who apply and are approved, but will be paid service in the future. Alternately, you can download the free Firefox or Chrome PageSpeed plugin.

What are your favorite website design tools? Share them with us in the comments!

By the way, for all professional services inquiries, we offer perspective clients a 30-minute no obligation needs analysis with our CEO and lead consultant, Don Nicholas. To schedule your needs analysis, contact our Member Services Manager Ann-Marie via email or by phone at  (617) 886-5177.

If you’re redesigning your website, or simply enjoy the art of color, consider these popular website color schemes and the tools that helped develop them.

Using Color Wheels Just Like a Pantone Swatch Book

Some color wheels offer you complete options visually, and when you hover over the colors of interest, you’re provided with the correlating HTML font color code. It’s sort of like a Pantone swatch book for the web.

ColourLovers, a site dedicated to complementary color palettes, is one option for choosing website color schemes. Their website trends section can tell you all of the most popular color palettes on the web right now and offer endless inspiration.

On ColourLovers you can create your own palettes, too. If you want to just start fresh, check out Color Scheme Designer 3.

Choosing Colors for your Buttons

A large publisher we worked with a couple years ago was using a fire-engine red order button with white letters throughout his online store. The site had a very clean blue and gold color scheme with a white background and black type. Full color product shots were available for all products.

He had read that “response red” was the order button color that would draw the highest response rates. But being a guy who would test everything, conventional wisdom be damned, he decided to test alternate order button color combinations (red/white, green/white, yellow/black, orange/black).

The test was run for a full week with order button click-through for all versions in the thousands. Compared to the loser, the winner increased response and revenues by 27 percent.

The winner was the orange button with blue text. Our theory was that because blue is the coldest and orange is the warmest of all the colors, when combined they result in a unique combination of high contrast that is also highly balanced and comfortable to the human eye.

When designing your site, buttons and all, you can try the Color Blind Filter for looking at your site through the eyes of someone who is colorblind. This perspective can really help you identify where your site lacks contrast.

Try the Contrast Ratio Calculator too – The W3C, which designers and developers turn to for current web standards, states “a contrast ratio of 3:1 is the minimum level recommended by [ISO-9241-3] and [ANSI-HFES-100-1988] for standard text and vision.” CheckMyColours.com will do it for you automatically.

The moral of the story here is that when it comes to button color – test, test, test! An easy tool for testing is Google Content Experiments (found in your Google Analytics) and web software like Unbounce.

More Tools for Picking Website Color Schemes

A lot of times when it comes to choosing colors, it’s about finding a tool that you like. Feel free to pick from any of the others below:

• Color Blender
• Contrast-A
• Contrast (iPhone App)
• GrayBit
• Color Rotate (Web & iPad App)
• Vischeck
• Color Explorer
• Color Oracle
• Color Combos

There are tons of publisher palettes in the trending palettes section of ColourLovers. If you ever wanted to find out what colors your competitors are using, or just try to digest why you like their site so much, check them out.

Five years ago, if you took a close look at the most visited sites on the Internet, you’d see an interesting phenomenon. They all seemed to use the same four colors.

It’s true. Many websites used the same basic color scheme with slight variations. Usually those four colors include two shades of blue, a shade of gray, and a shade of yellow or ochre. White was (and still is) the predominant background color, with a pale blue coming in second. For a time, sites like Yahoo, Amazon, MSN, Walmart, PC MAgazine, AOL and Wall Street Journal all looked fairly similar.

In fact, if you look at the two leading social networks right now, Twitter and Facebook, the two leading colors are still white and blue.

Louis Cheskin was founder of the Color Research Institute of America, and was the packaging genius who created the Gerber baby, designed the 7-Up label, and put the spoon on Betty Crocker packages.

Mr. Cheskin discovered that the four characteristics of colors—visibility, retention, preference, and association—are sometimes different for men and women.

For men, blue rates low in visibility and retention, but high in preference. Men generally associate blue with the words “reliable” and “intelligent.”

However, for women, blue also rates low in visibility and retention, as well as low in preference. Women generally associate blue with the words “depressing” and “professional.”

Nevertheless, when asked, more people of both genders cite blue as their favorite color.

Mr. Cheskin was fond of saying “perception is reality” and wasn’t interested in what customers thought about the packages he created. Instead, what was important to him was how colors and packaging made them feel about the product.

Food for thought: How do the colors of your website make your customers feel about your publication, website and its products?

The most important goal when designing a website is to figure out the main funnel that gets a visitor to complete a transaction. That transaction may be monetary (a sale) or not (a subscription to your email newsletter).

Effective website design is based on efficiency, clarity, and user-friendly elements that take the visitor through the funnel.

Check out these 13 best website design tools that cover all of the above.

Best Website Design Tool #1
HubSpot’s Marketing Grader - This tool will take you through the funnels of your website and tell you where you dropped the ball. It’ll tell you if you blog too much, or too little, whether you’re missing crucial social media elements on the site, and more obscure things like whether your headlines are too long.

Best Website Design Tool #2
Contrast Ratio Calculator – The W3C, which designers and developers turn to for current web standards, states “a contrast ratio of 3:1 is the minimum level recommended by [ISO-9241-3] and [ANSI-HFES-100-1988] for standard text and vision.” Have no idea how to find a color to fit those requirements? Try this online tool.

UXBooth.com notes that, “while these rules imply that higher contrast ratios are ultimately better, some people suggest that too high of contrast actually hurts to read, and use off-white backgrounds, or off-black text instead of 100% black on white. There is however not much quantitative data in this regard. A few sources claim that too much contrast can be difficult for dyslexic readers to view. With these considerations in mind, some designers opt to use #333 instead of #000 (or similar off-blacks) in attempt to make reading more pleasant.”

Best Website Design Tool #3
Google Content Experiments – To say that Google Content Experiments (GCE) is a very basic A/B tester would be an understatement. But its simplicity is also what makes it so great. Within Google Analytics, you assign which page from your live website you’d like to test within the GCA dashboard. Then you can add up to six different variations to be tested. There are plenty of good paid A/B testing tools too,  like Unbounce and Optimizely.

Best Website Design Tool #4
CrazyEgg Heatmaps - CrazyEgg creates a heatmap of where users click on a particular page. The more they click the more red the area will be in heatmap. It’s an excellent tool to see where people are clicking on your site. You can test order form positions, advertisements, new content, and any kind of clickable area. You can see which navigation buttons they use, too. After enough visitors come to your site, you’ll know what’s hot and what’s not. On the same note, there are lots of cool heat-tracking tools you can use like ClickHeat and Click Density.

Best Website Design Tool #5
ScratchPad – It hasn’t publicly launched yet, but this tool is sort of the Pinterest of web design tools. Anytime you visit a website where you like the way a button looks, or how a headline is styled, or a call-to-action is placed, you can clip those elements and store them. When you’re re-designing your website or making updates, you can look back at all the smart design decisions you liked.

Best Website Design Tool #6
Templatr: If you’re creating a robust website with many types of pages, you’ll likely want to create templates. This will allow for consistency, and will make the process more efficient. Templatr is one tool that can help in this process.

Best Website Design Tool #7
CSS Type Set: This helpful tool allows you to paste copy into the text box, select the font, size, color, and special formatting options. Then you can view the CSS version of it immediately to the right.

Best Website Design Tool #8
CSS Compressor: This tool compresses your CSS so it’ll load quicker and save on bandwidth.

Best Website Design Tool #9
Lubith: Since many digital publishers utilize the open source community behind WordPress, this tool will help you create a custom theme. This is especially helpful for those launching new websites.

Best Website Design Tool #10
AddThis – AddThis is probably the most legit way to go about implementing social sharing links on your website, because they use the official Facebook “like” button, Twitter “share” button amongst others, all in one tool. Its design is also discrete and page footprint is much smaller than other plugins. It also offers several different customizable options on appearance.

Best Website Design Tool #11
Pingdom: This tool will test your full website page by loading the complete HTML page, including objects such as images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes. The tool then acts like a web browser and loads the page to tell you how fast or slow it loads.

Best Website Design Tool #12
Google’s PageSpeed: This service is in beta, so you need to sign up for it, but it “fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.” As of today, the current service is free to webmasters who apply and are approved, but will be a paid service in the future. Alternately, you can download the free Firefox or Chrome PageSpeed plugin.

Best Website Design Tool #13
Webpagetest.org: Another more in-depth service and despite its dated appearance, it’s Google’s preferred tool for discovering more useful data about your website speed.

We’ve known for ages in print that effective use of white space (number of columns, bolding, margins, etc.) increases reader pleasure. The same design principles apply on the web.

White space and employing Gestalt principles of continuity, similarity and proximity are even more important when formatting news content for the web. This is because web users tend not to read pages to determine if the content is relevant to their information search. They scan for information or clues to where they might find what they’re looking for.

Do your users find what they’re looking for? Are you using any of these tools, or want to share your favorites?

If you’re starting or relaunching an online business and need help with the development, contact Ann-Marie Sullivan, our members service manager, to set up a no-obligation call with Don Nicholas, Mequoda’s CEO and lead consultant.

The website design process hasn’t really changed in the last ten years. You come up with a wireframe, a designer mocks it up, a developer makes a test site and after weeks of going through each agonizing detail you deploy your new design. It’s a fairly static process; however, there’s an endless supply of questions about colors, calls to action, fonts, copy, images and everything under the sun.

The first thing to know is that your initial iteration is unlikely to ever be the best one. As publishers, you’re probably on version five, 10 or even 20, depending how long you’ve been around. We spend a lot of time hiring beta testers to sit in front of computers with eye-tracking devices to test our clients’ websites. It tells us more about how easy the site is to navigate, find what they’re looking for, and how effective our calls to actions are. At this point, we’ve discovered a pretty standard set of elements that do work, and ones that just don’t.

If you want to build your own little in-house website lab, there are two types of website design tools that should be in your toolbelt: A/B testing software and heat tracking software.

There are plenty of good paid A/B testing tools like Unbounce and Optimizely but today we’re talking about Google Content Experiments because it’s free and it lets you test SEO on your own site.

On the same note, there are lots of cool heat-tracking tools you can use like ClickHeat and Click Density, but we’re going to use Crazy Egg because it’s extremely user-friendly and cheap ($9/mo+)

Starting Today

I want you to think about web design as a dynamic process. A process in which the website design tools used aren’t just Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. They involve tools like Google Content Experiments and CrazyEgg. These tools allow companies to narrow down and find the designs and layouts that will convert more users. We should have always been letting the users dictate aspects of our designs and now we can.

Google Content Experiments and CrazyEgg both fall into the category as tools for preforming A/B split tests in one way or another. You should be thinking about these tests as soon as your basic design iterations are complete. How do you use these tools? What kinds of things should you test? All of your questions will be answered below.

During the development process you should create iterations of the pages you’d like to test. These pages you test should all have a definable goal to them, like a call to action button or a “buy it now” link. These variations in design could be as broad as a complete layout change or as fine a granularity as a color change on a call to action button.

You should think about creating iterations of:

• Your homepage
• Sales pages
• Product pages
• Blog page

Next, feed these iterations to Google Content Experiments, which is a tool built into Google Analytics (GA). You’ll need to load entire pages into Content Experiments, you can’t just swap out headlines or buttons (not yet, anyways). So create as many versions of your landing pages that you want to test. And perhaps think about testing one element per version so that you know why the winner was the winner.

To find Content Experiments within GA:

1. Click on Standard Reporting in the top navigation bar
2. Click on the Content Tab on the left vertical navigation bar
3. Finally, click on the Experiments link within the Content section (just below the AdSense link)

To say that Google Content Experiments (GCA) is basic would be an understatement. But it’s simplicity is what makes it so great. You assign which page from your live website you’d like to test within the GCA dashboard. Then you can add up to six different variations to be tested.

To start the experiment you need to drop a piece of code into the page you’d like to test. GCA will serve up the original version of the page or one of the variations of that page to a certain percentage of visitors you specify. GCA will then track to see which page receives the most interaction. After enough traffic has visited your site you can see which pages had the most conversions and highest conversion rate.

Once you find the variation that converts the best, you can then stop the experiment and make the highest converting page the one that stays live. The users choose which page provides the clearest action for them. You’re merely providing them with a few different style frameworks. Depending on how much traffic you have to the your site; you could have a winning page in as little as a week.

A Good Egg

Now that you have a winning layout, don’t you want to know why it won? You can dig deeper into user interactions on the page by using a website design tool called CrazyEgg.

CrazyEgg creates a heatmap of where users click on a particular page. The more they click the more red the area will be in heatmap. It’s an excellent tool to see where people are clicking on your site. You can test order form positions, advertisements, new content, and any kind of clickable area. You can see which navigation buttons they use, too. After enough visitors come to your site, you’ll know what’s hot and what’s not.

They also have a number of other tracking tools so you can really dive into the interactions on you site. Their other tracking tools are:

• ScrollMap – this shows where people scrolled and stopped on a page, perfect for sales pages with lots of copy.
• Overlay Tool – this shows you the interactions with specific elements on your page.
• Confetti Tool – this tool shows you where clicks are coming from that can be segmented by referral source or search term. You’ll know if visitors from Spain click on your call to actions more than visitors from England.

These website design tools help you create pages that convert better and offer the user a more enjoyable experience. How has A/B testing influenced your designs? Have you had large increases in conversions from a design change made from A/B testing? Please share your experience in the comments.

And if you’d like to discuss the redesign of your website, contact Ann-Marie Sullivan, our member services manager, and she’ll schedule an opportunity for you to chat with Don Nicholas, our CEO and lead consultant.

“People hate to wait,” Andy King states in the opening line of his book, Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization (VOICES). “The Web is essentially a self-service environment. A core promise of self-service is speed. A customer turns to self-service to save time, to save money and because it is more convenient.”

Your website should load in three to five seconds, and that includes the stylesheet files that illustrate the fonts, colors, styles and structure of your website.  People expect information these days to load instantaneously and require no effort to consume. Two phenomena contribute to the users expectation of download time:

1. Broadband has dramatically shortened download time and
2. People are no longer going to the web just to be entertained, they’re looking for information.

If they can’t get a lead on what they’re looking for, they ‘ll Google their way right off your site and onto another.

The Pingdom Tool will test your full website page by loading the complete HTML page, including objects such as images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes. The tool then acts like a web browser and loads the page.

The load time of all the objects tested will then be shown visually with time bars. Each test will give you valuable information including statistics on the total load time of the page, the total number of objects tested and the size of the site including all of the objects.

The highest score we were able to get from this tool was 91/100, and that was for Pingdom itself. Next in line was 88/100 for Google.com. Pingdom took four seconds to load and Google took less than a second, so there are obviously other factors at work here.

Google’s PageSpeed service is in beta, so you need to sign up for it, but it “fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.” As of today, the current service is free to webmasters who apply and are approved, but will be paid service in the future. Alternately, you can download the free Firefox or Chrome PageSpeed plugin.

Webpagetest.org is another more in-depth service and despite its dated appearance, it’s Google’s preferred tool for discovering more useful data about your website speed.

YSlow: This website load test Firefox add-on, created by the Yahoo! Developer Network, will tell you why a certain website is loading slowly. If you’re using it on your own website, it’s a great tool because it will give you very specific suggestions to decrease website load time. For example, on one site we tested, it said the site should “make fewer HTTP requests”. When you click on the recommendation, it told us that the site had 12 external JavaScript files, 6 external stylesheets and 8 external CSS background images.

WebsiteOptimization.com: This free web page analysis tool calculates page size, composition, and download time. It also gives speed recommendations based on best practices for usability, HCI, and website optimization.

In terms of speeding up your website, these two tools are recommended by ReadWriteWeb:

• mod_pagespeed, a module for Apache that rewrites the HTML, JavaScript, CSS and image assets on a page and serves them to visitors more efficiently.
• MinifyJavaScript is a simple, Web-based tool for compressing JavaScript right in the browser. Similarly, this site will do the same thing for JavaScript and CSS using Yahoo’s YUI Compressor.
• Minify is a PHP-based tool that developers can use to automatically compress and consolidate external scripts and stylesheets. There’s also a WordPress plugin for it.

Online publishers should be concerned if their websites are slow to load. Users are paying larger Internet bills to have websites pop open, not gradually load. If your site’s load time is sluggish, users will surely take their business to a faster competitor.

People make snap decisions about the value and credibility of your site. According to the book Website Optimization by Andrew King, in as little as 1/20th of a second, users form a first impression of your site that does not change significantly over time. Confirming these results, website analyzers found that the ratings users gave a site after half a second were consistent with their rating after 10 seconds. In other words, you have to make a good impression, and you have to make it quickly.

Call us spoiled or impatient, but the fact is that the Web-using public doesn’t want to wait at all. If your landing page loads at anything slower than the speed of instant gratification, you run a serious risk of losing your customer.

As webpages grow in complexity, page load time can take longer and longer. This can translate into a loss of readers, page views, advertising impressions, click-throughs and ultimately, a loss of revenue.

For all professional services inquiries, we offer perspective clients a 30-minute no obligation needs analysis with our CEO and lead consultant, Don Nicholas. To schedule your needs analysis, contact our Member Services Manager Ann-Marie via email or by phone at  (617) 886-5177.

Your media website must include certain components or you’ll fail to retain an audience and generate enough revenue to keep operating.

Some online business owners don’t understand all the aspects that go into designing websites, and then they reach market and develop many regrets.

We don’t want to see any more publishers experience the problems associated with poorly performing websites, which is why we’ve developed the Designing Media Websites that Work webinar. This 90-minute program will walk you through functionality that’s included in successful media websites. You’ll get a sense of what’s important in website design, and what helps to retain an audience.

This webinar is a must-attend for publishers launching a new website or preparing to re-launch in the future. Without the insight from this webinar, your ability to develop the best website may be seriously lacking.

Discover the secrets behind successful website design when you join us for Designing Media Websites that Works on Nov. 6.

Interactive parts of working media websites

One of the most important sections of this webinar discusses the parts of a successful website that users have become accustomed to.

First, there’s the need for a blog, optimized and managed by knowledgeable staff members. The blog is where new visitors will come to consume your free content. The free report marketplace is closely aligned with your blog. It serves as a main point of conversions because visitors often trade their email address for access and ownership of a free report from the marketplace.

Then there’s the forum used to keep your audience engaged. Although social media has become popular with social communication, a forum can still hold the key to mass correspondence on a topic related to your organization and managed by your staff.

These areas of your website put your audience first by drawing them into the community, sharing information with them, and showing them how important they are to you.

Can you survive without having an audience behind your content? Of course not! That’s why you must attend Designing Media Websites that Work so you can master the development behind engaging websites.

How to generate revenue with your website

Beyond the organic, engaging parts of your website are the pages where you can directly make money.

These pages include the online store, events website, and magazine website.

All of these website parts must be clear, concise, and informative, and present the audience with calls to action and the ability to accept direct responses.

The online store, events site and magazine site are main revenue generators that are continuously updated with the latest information. The long-standing pages attract backlinks and constant traffic, making them candidates for well-ranking pages.

Do you rely on these parts of a media website to generate your revenue? Are they properly designed and functioning accurately? The online store, events website and magazine website need serious attention and they need to be tested often.

If you’re most important website components aren’t operating correctly, you could be losing money on potential sales. Join us for Designing Media Websites that Work to see design elements online stores should have.

Register for Designing Media Websites that Work today because we cap the number of attendees for this webinar. Mequoda Pro subscribers are already eligible to attend with their active membership. Become a Mequoda Pro subscriber and receive invitations to all live webinars and access to over 45 on-demand webinars now.

Below we have some articles going more in depth explaining what responsive web design really is, and some great visuals of how sites adapt when used on different platforms. In the third article, NetMagazine will give you a good jump start on how to begin creating a responsive web design of your own.

What’s responsive Web design all about?

When you consider how many different tablets, laptops, Web browsers, and operating systems access the Internet on a day-to-day basis, it’s a small miracle that Web designers and developers manage to stay sane. There are, of course, Web standards and entire organizations that exist for the sole purpose of making sure the Internet you see is generally the same Internet that everyone else sees. But the sheer number of devices can pose a bit of a problem when you’re attempting to create a site or service that works well for the masses.

In the past, a developer or designer might code a different site for desktop and mobile users, often with some or all of the same functionality. For the most part, in fact, this is still how things are done today. But in some cases, that’s beginning to change. A relatively new technique called “responsive design” has been gaining traction over the past few years, and it’s promising to change the way we code and interact with the Internet on devices of all shapes and sizes.

Responsive Web design, as the name implies, is a style of Web development where content responds to the device on which it is being rendered. So, while a website viewed from within a traditional desktop browser might be rendered one way, a tablet or smartphone browser will be smart enough to render that same code in a different way—one that takes into account the size and resolution of a smaller screen. Text is reflowed, navigation is simplified, and images are shrunk, or even hidden entirely, and the code to do it all needs only be written once.

See the full article on responsive web design from ArsTechnica here

Best Mobile Websites – Responsive Web Design

The recent rise of mobile devices popularity and use had provoked a need of adapting websites for varying screen sizes and browsers. One of the main approaches to this problem is responsive web design.

Responsive websites are those that recognize their environment and adapt to the screen in which are being viewed. That includes the content, if you are showing exactly the same content, only adapted to be comfortably seen on a small screen that forces the viewer to scroll constantly, you are doing it wrong. This approach has its drawbacks too and many aspects such as budget for the project, client, etc. must be taken into account when deciding if it is the right choice for a particular project.

Anyhow, if you think about it, every mobile website must be partially responsive, or at least have a flexible layout so it can adapt to vertical and horizontal view in phones with orientation recognition, and to different screen sizes.
Let’s take a look at a selection of the best responsive design mobile websites you can find around the Internet and analyse what makes their designs great.

See the full article from OnBile on responsive web design here

Build a responsive site in a week: designing responsively (part 1)

Interested in responsive web design but not sure how to get started? Don’t fret, help is at hand! As part of Responsive Week, we’ve asked Clearleft’s Paul Robert Lloyd to talk us through the responsive design process, soup to nuts

It seems everyone is talking about responsive web design these days, and with good reason; as the number of web-enabled devices continues to grow – each with differing capabilities and features – it’s no longer sensible to build fixed-width websites.

Truth is, it never was. Yet until now it was considered best practice to design experiences that made a number of assumptions, be they around screen resolution, bandwidth or input method. If you’ve ever designed a 960px-wide website, only to view it on a friend’s small screen netbook (and yes, I’m writing from painful experience here), you’ll understand why this wasn’t a particularly clever approach. Now, with smartphones and tablets thrown into the mix, it’s clear that our traditional methods are no longer fit for purpose.

See the full article on responsive web design from NetMagazine here

Finally, we have an article from Chris Sturk at Mequoda on responsive website design:

3 Important Elements of Responsive Website Design

Is responsive website design the future for digital publishers?

As websites optimize for growing mobile demands, popularity turns towards responsive website design. Although not a new technique for designing, digital publishers are quick to consider the possibilities that come with responsive website design.

After researching the topic, I’ve come to find three important elements to responsive website design: flexible layouts, flexible images, and media queries.

See the full article from Chris at Mequoda here

As websites optimize for growing mobile demands, popularity turns towards responsive website design. Although not a new technique for designing, digital publishers are quick to consider the possibilities that come with responsive website design.

After researching the topic, I’ve come to find three important elements to responsive website design: flexible layouts, flexible images, and media queries.

Responsive website design element: flexible layouts – This aspect of responsive website design allows websites to match the device they are being viewed on. It resizes and repositions content as needed. For instance, the website would properly optimize for a computer’s 17” screen or a smartphone’s 3.5” screen. Flexible layout gained popularity as tablet design became a necessity for publishers.

Responsive website design element: flexible images – Similar to flexible layouts, developers can easily adjust images with responsive website design. Resizing of the image or cropping can be easily done.

Responsive website design element: media queries – This element allows designers to create layouts using the same content. This way, different style sheets can be used between mobile or PC settings.

If you are in the process of using responsive website design, this article from .net offers 50 tools for responsive website design.

Lots of people are looking into responsive website design these days but some people seem to be having concerns about cost? Below are a few articles that should help with the confusion surrounding these subjects.

5 Most Common Mistakes Website Developers Should Avoid

Nowadays when the Internet is full of websites suited to every fancy it is highly important that your website is to be of the highest enhancement level and satisfy particular requirements of web users. While you strive to make your website one of the most desirable for users (as many other web developers do, by the way) you should oversee all potential mistakes and, if it is found impossible, avoid it in every way possible.

Let’s take a look into five the most common mistakes that every web developer should avoid.

Security fault

You have nothing to worry about until your website doesn’t contain a huge amount of information. But if it does so, you should prevent any unauthorized access to the database of your clients’ information and to your company information that is under your Privacy Policy. The best way to take care about security is to include such clause into your development plan at a very beginning.

See all 5 website design mistakes from TechTalkAfrica here

5 Reasons Why You Need a Content Managed Website

I am often surprised when I meet with a new web design client and they describe the kind of site they want and they make no mention of a content management system (CMS.) Now to be fair, I understand that there are still a lot of people out there who are unfamiliar with what exactly a CMS is, and how it can positively impact their business.

A CMS is a computer system that allows for publishing, editing and modifying content all without having to touch the website’s code. This is great news for business owners who aren’t particularly tech savvy. Typically, the process you would go through to have a site designed for you is the same as it has always been. You meet with your web designer and communicate your needs with them. They then design and build the site, but they do it within the framework of a specified CMS. Then you can take control of the site by adding content and expanding the site as needed.

Learn all 5 reasons why you need a content managed website from BuisnessInsider here

How Much Does a Responsive Web Design Cost?

Answer: $13.47.

Asking “How much does a responsive web design cost” and expecting a cut-and-dry, prescriptive answer just ain’t happening. Brian Hoff (@behoff) handily explains why in his article What Does a Website Cost?

Imagine asking a Real Estate company, “How much does a house cost?” Well it depends. First off, what are the essentials you need? Three bedrooms because you have two kids? Central air conditioning because you live down south? Now that we have the essentials, what are some of the less essential, yet nice features? Basement? Extra storage? Large backyard? Three car garage? What if you could have it your way? How about a pool? Sounds nice right?

The fact is that responsive web design costs more…than doing nothing. Sure, you could continue building sites the old fashioned way and ignore the multitude of web-enabled devices accessing the web now and in the future. But this is 2012. At the very least a web experience should have at least some mobile consideration, and at the very most a site should be full-on mobile optimized.

I’ve seen a project that didn’t take mobile into consideration at its inception, and about 80% through the design process the client asked “How will this work on an iPad?” And everybody freaked out. Schedules got rearranged. Budgets increased. And ultimately a desktop-only design was shoehorned onto mobile devices.

Learn more about responsive web design from Bradfrostweb here

Finally, be sure to check out our FREE mobile site design for content publishers:

Mobile Site Design for Content Publishers

Get the latest mobile publishing tips in this FREE white paper from the Mequoda Group.

Usability doesn’t end at Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. With the advent of iPhones and other SmartPhones, there is a sudden influx of people accessing information on-demand with their cell phones.

So what does that tell us? That tells us that the easier it is to access the Web from a cell phone, the more likely a user is going to use it. Let’s face it, we didn’t have a lot to worry about when users were struggling and frustrated with working their tiny browser on a 2×2” screen.

Now it’s time to start taking mobile more seriously

See more mobile design tips from Mequoda here