Web Design Archives - Page 2 of 2

If You Don’t Pay Attention To The Ads, We’ll Make Them Even Bigger!

March 12, 2009 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

I spend many hours every day working in the online newspaper world. The print side of the business is in serious decline all over the country, which is putting more pressure on online to make more money.

Since you did such a good job of ignoring banner ads, we made them flash. Still, you ignored them, so we made them interactive with Flash. Still you ignored them, so we made them slide into the area you were trying to read. Still you ignored them. We even made walk on ads where your local car dealer would walk, and talk at you down at the bottom of your browser, still you stood aloof. Well, you have done so at your own peril, because the ad world is preparing a trio of new monsters that will not be ignored.

green_monster — The Green Monster at Fenway Park photo by: alex

AdWeek reports:

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ESPN and over a dozen more of the Web’s most-trafficked sites that belong to the Online Publishers Association have agreed to run three new ad units that they hope will lure brand advertising dollars.

The new units are:

• The fixed panel, a 336-by-860-pixel banner that is wider than the standard skyscraper and follows users as they scroll down the page.

• The XXL box, a 468-by-648-pixel unit that can expand with video.

• The push-down, a 970-by-418-pixel placement that takes up over half of the page before rolling up.

Yes, you read that last one right, a 970-by-418 takeover ad!

Is this the right way to reach you?

Can anyone tell me about a time you clicked on an online ad and bought something? I would love to hear what types of things can get immediate action like that.

Optimizing Your Navigational Links

March 8, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Last week I heard from one of the McClatchy markets who were updating their navigation. They wanted to see if they could make some changes that would be more search friendly. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to cover a lot of ground relating to one simple question.

Most McClatchy sites, and in fact, most newspaper sites have a very similar navigation bar. The roughly correspond to the sections of a traditional newspaper, News, Business, Sports, Living, Entertainment, Obituaries and Classifieds. The problem is that in most cases those are not always the most popular places on their site. Every market has it’s own speciality.

If you visit the Miami Herald site, they should be highlighting their “Entertainment”ish sections much more than the Charlotte Observer, may be highlighting their Banking or Business sections, and the McClatchy DC Bureau should be highlighting their national and political reach.

The market I’m working with is the Centre Daily Times in State College, PA (home of Penn State University). Their biggest claim to fame is obviously all their Penn State coverage and their insights. There is no reason they shouldn’t be proud of that connection and leverage it. Some of my suggestions seems crazy to traditional newspaper people, but that’s only because I have no newspaper background.

Navigational Light - Photo by: Matti Mattila

The navigational tweaks I suggested to them, can benefit any site.

1. Be Specific. Instead of plain old “News” as the main link, use “Central PA News”. If that is too restrictive for the main category, make sure you are more specific in the sub-nav below. Instead of a sub-nav pointing at “Local”, change it to “State College News”. Nobody is going to type “local” into a search engine.

2. Make decisions based on hard data. Avinash Kaushik, analytics evangelist at Google, warns against “sites that are so often poorly designed because they rely too heavily on HiPPOs–another acronym that stands for the ‘Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion.'” For Centre Daily, they had 15 sections that attracted more than 1% of their traffic over the past year. Of those top 15 sections, only 3 are in the main navigation.

Check your navigation choices in Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool. Using the keyword tool, I can see “news” is in 45 million searches each month, “local news” is in about 673,000 searches each month, “pa news” is in 90,500 searches and “state college news” averages about 1,900 searches.

If I want to really target State College, PA – I want those 1,900 searchers every month, but I also want as big a chunk of those 90 thousand PA searchers. If we look at March ’09, Centre Daily had 27,000 visits that originated from Google, roughly 16% were searches for “centre daily times”, so we can pretty much throw that out. After that their #2 keyword was “veterans benefits”, which is great, that word gets roughly 165,000 searches each month. Now the follow-up question is, are they trying to do anything with “veteran benefits”?

3. Don’t get stuck on stupid. Just like Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré said to the mainstream media after hurricane Katrina. Make changes if something isn’t working. Don’t let your pride get tied into your design decisions.

Do You Need A Site Redesign?

January 29, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I had an interesting talk this afternoon with the Innovation and Product Development guy at one of the McClatchy markets. He wants to do a site redesign. He wanted my input.

A complete redesign is a big project. It means a minimum of 4 months of hard work, and what does it get you? Let’s think about the pros and cons of a complete overhaul.

The current site is not awesome, but it is not terrible. In the galaxy of news sites, it is clearly in the middle. In many ways, that IS the problem. Seth Godin says it best in his book The Big Moo : Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable:

In the old days, showing up was 95 percent of success. If you offered a good product at a good price in a reliable way, you’d do fine. Being local was a good thing. Having a long track record helped. Decent quality and personal service mattered as well.

No longer. Good enough isn’t good enough, because now everything is good enough. Our expectations of quality are unrealistic – and are being met every single day. We don’t just want to be satisfied, we want to be blown away.

Now that brings up another part of that equation. What blows away people when they visit a news site? Is it shiny objects or is it news that is compelling? I think it’s a little bit shiny, but mostly a connection with the readers.

I asked him if he has invited readers to give feedback, maybe ask a dozen or so in, and listen to them about what they want from the site. “Marketing is working on a set of questions”, was the answer.

Marketing really only needs one question, “What can we do to make our site better for you?” After asking that question, you listen and take notes. Since you have no idea what the answers are going to be, just keep an open mind. The only other question I would ask is, “What do you use our site for now?”

The challenge for a web designer at a news site is the fact that a cool widget rarely makes the difference for where someone goes to get their news. But, people generally are drawn to stories where there is compelling photos and/or video, and that is usually lacking in the McClatchy online culture.

Detroit City Council Gone Wild

Because the journalists are still writing for print first, they don’t think to snap a couple of digital pictures, or grab the flip video camera on their way over to the city hall meeting, but you never know what could crop up. Maybe even the wife of a US Congressman will call someone Shrek and keep yelling, “Do it baby!”

There’s a reason that sites like Huffington Post and Human Events have devoted followings. They know what their audience wants, they respond to a constant stream of comments, and they generate more content to satisfy them.

Newspapers have never had to compete like that. Now, on the web, all but the very largest news sites need to find their sweet spot. I can’t imagine that many people in San Luis Obispo California went to sanluisobispo.com on election nights to watch the state by state results come in on November 4th. But when you start planning your trip to California wine country, you won’t start at CNN.

Christopher Penn just wrote a fantastic article about Money as Trust where he ends with:

What should YOU be doing right now, in this economy? Building trust. Building relationships. Strengthening your network. Growing your network. Why? Relationships can exist without money – barter, trade, collaboration. Money can’t exist without relationships, because without trust, money itself fails.

Dedicate yourself to what you do best, local, in fact, hyper-local coverage that gives your readers an angle or insights the can’t get anywhere else. Try to reach out and get you 1,000 true fans. Respond to the community. Use twitter, use Mixx, use Social|Median, use digg, use reddit, use Facebook, use every avenue open to you. But don’t use them like a lazy news organization, use them like you are part of the community. Respect the 80/20 rule.

So I guess in the end, you probably don’t need a site redesign, but you probably need a culture redesign.

Online news is not like the old print newsroom, which is a good thing. Online and print have very little in common. When cars took over from horses, the stable owners didn’t force you to park you car in there, just because that’s the way it had always been done.

The answer is change. Adapt or die. There are plenty of examples of newspapers that are dead or dying. You still have a chance to turn on a dime and adapt – take advantage of it.

Top 5 Things For A New Website Owner To Do

January 20, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Everyone needs to be on the web. Even if it’s a one page site that just lists the address and phone number of your brick and mortar store. Hopefully, you want to do a bit more that just a page with your address and phone number on it.

Small business owners need a checklist they can look at and check off, that’s what this post hopes to accomplish.

1. Put analytics on your site. If you want something free and easy, I would suggest Google Analytics. Once that is installed you can start to see who is coming, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, and where they jump ship. You can do lots of more complicated and customized stuff using the advanced features available from Google Analytics, but that is for another post.

2. Understand the difference between “hits”, “page views”, “visitors”, “unique visitors” and “time on site”. Back in the stone age, people talked about “hits”, but what they really meant was the number of pages viewed per day(or week, month, year). “Page Views” is still something some sites care about, usually if they sell advertising that is priced by page impressions. A site like the Drudge Report can report “visits” as an accurate metric, because he has a one page site.

Unique visitors is an interesting metric, and is a much better count of visitors. On the flip side is “Return Visitors”, which also can give you certain insights. A commonly overlooked metric is how much time visitors are spending on your site, aka “stickiness”. Obviously more is better, unless they don’t end up buying.

3. The number one metric you should be tracking is CONVERSIONS! If your site makes money by selling something, you need to track the funnel. You can see where people leave the path you so carefully planned for them. You should be constantly tweaking and A/B testing until nobody can escape.

4. Put your address, email and phone number on your site. Even better, put it in the footer of every page. If someone wants to find you or call you, don’t make it hard. This also allows Google and Yahoo to add you to their local business directories, but you shouldn’t wait for them to find you, you should add yourself.

5. Sign up for Google’s Webmaster Tools. This tool is invaluable for finding problems with your site.

None of these cost anything, and probably would take a novice a couple of hours.

Once these items are knocked out, it’s time to start phase 2, which will be my next post.

Redesign Do’s and Don’ts

January 6, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

My friends down in Fort Worth, Texas are planning a major redesign of the Star-Telegram.com website.

A couple years ago, I helped them move from their old Knight-Ridder platform, to their new McClatchy CMS. The move was major, but the design was kept the same. Then about a year ago, they gave their site a face lift and that’s where they’re at now.

I was talking with Cody at the Star-Telegram this afternoon about some of the design, SEO and core functionality they should consider for their next redesign. When I started thinking about it, it became a pretty long list. Then it dawned on me that many of the suggestions are not limited to Star-Telegram.

So my #1 piece of advice is… Take 1/2 the stuff you currently have on your section fronts OFF, maybe even 2/3 of it. For some reason, there is a perception that visitors will not look any deeper than the homepage. Let me be clear about this one… on a normal site, that may be true, but when someone goes to a newspaper site, they don’t expect everything to be on the front page. The people laying out the print paper certainly understand this, they don’t feel the need to have 300 stories highlighted on the front page.

Today there was 353 links on their homepage, 205 of them internal. That seems like a lot to me. It’s not that far out of the “norm” for a news site, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. The homepage highlights over 20 other sections. That must be reduced. It’s overwhelming, and keeps the visitor from being able to focus on any one thing.

#2. Stop publishing stories to multiple sections. The McClatchy CMs allows you to publish stories to multiple sections, which makes sense in some sense, but it’s actual application makes it a problem. One of the main problems is from the SEO perspective of duplicate content. Having exactly the same article repeated 3 or 4 times is not optimal. Until the CMS can give that story a single url, that is used in multiple sections, it should be avoided.

#3 Cull down you sections. You don’t need 350 different sections. If I were the CMS Czar, all the sites would be limited to 40 sections.

#4 Stop publishing stories that are only 2 paragraphs. This one is certainly not specific to Star-Telegram. There are lots of stories that are “updates” or “breaking” that are just too short. I understand if the story is something important, but that is rarely the case.

#5 Start linking. Another one that plagues all the McClatchy property. Did I miss the memo that said, “don’t ever put a link in a story”? Understand that no one thinks you are the ultimate source on every subject. The heart of the web is that articles are hyperlinked.

#6 Add assets to every story you can. I want to see a picture of the kid that won the contest, or the teacher that was arrested or even the house that was raided. In fact, I also want you to embed a Google map of the crack house that was raided so I know where it is.

#7 Work with bloggers. Bloggers are not the enemy. They want exposure, you could use their content/photos/podcasts or whatever your people are failing to get you.

A couple weeks ago, I was adding some assets to a high school football story for The Fresno Bee, and ran across a fantatsic collection high school football photos by John Canton who had a couple of kids playing for the team. He had hundreds thousands of fantastic photos available, and he made them available to anyone. I added one of his photos (with attribution) and a link back to his site. I’m sure he liked the exposure, and The Bee got to use a great picture.

#8 Leverage social media, without being boring. We have tried to use Facebook and Twitter for a couple of sites, but just dumping headlines into the social media stream is not only useless, but seen as rather offensive to the majority of users who make an actual effort to be part of the community.

What I’ve talked to DC about is actually using an app like Twitter to engage the community. The political news junkies are very plugged in, and want to know everything. Why not pull them into the conversation earlier. How about a tweet like, “Harry Reid’s office refuses to say if Roland Burris will be seated today”… and actually put that out in the wild BEFORE you have the story written.

#9 Stop accepting takeover ads, flyover ads and autoplay talking ads. You do not make your users love you when you force things on them.

#10. Strip your main navigation down to bare minimum. This one is like the homepage argument, you don’t need to show everything you have every time someone mouses over a link. Most people are smart enough to find what they are looking for. For example, if I want the score of last nights game, I already figure I’m gonna need to go through “Sports” to get it, and I won’t complain if I actually have to click on Sports. Oh, and don’t stick flash ads in your drop down navigation, it makes you seem a bit desperate.

#11 Can you explain, in one sentencee, what the object of the site is? If you can’t, you need to figure it out. Once you do, tape it to the monitor and make sure everything you do is leading to that goal.

If the goal is to keep the locals of Fort Worth, Texas informed about the Cowboys, why are you spending money on covering the City Hall meetings? If your goal is to cover all the news in Ft. Worth better than anyone else… you need to define what that means.

Really think hard about your goal. Can you reach your goal with your current team? If not, why not? What if you asked for help from a community that would probably love to help?

Why You Should Stop Supporting IE6

January 2, 2009 by Phil Buckley 5 Comments

Now that Internet giant Google has started telling it’s users to stop using IE6 to access GMail, you should to. The only time anyone should be supporting IE6 anymore is when they are working on an intranet app that will only be accessed by the poor souls forced by corporate policy to use it.

Microsoft even sent out an update last February that “auto-updated” users to IE7. But, not everyone has those turned on, or installs them once they are downloaded.

Reason #1 is simple. IE6 is a terrible browser. It couldn’t be any more non-compliant if it had set out to be.

ie6 Reason #2: Usage has dropped to 20%. In 2005 usage of IE6 was over 80%. Firefox users now outnumber IE6 users.

Reason #3: If you continue to support IE6, people will continue to use it, which is bad, see reason #1.

Reason #4: When someone like Google stops supporting a browser, it’s a watershed moment for that browser. I understand part of the reason Google is doing this is to push Chrome, but the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people will be nudged to abandon IE6.

Reason #5: The other choices are far superior. Even users that want/need to stay with IE can upgrade to 7 and be much better off. Just the tabs in IE7 will be a productivity boost for most users.

Reason #6: No transparent png support.

Reason #7: The IE Developers Toolbar is sub-par. Trying to debug and fix IE problems are too much of a hassle now. Once tools like Firebug became available for Firefox, who would ever develop in IE?

Reason #8: Security. IE6 has so many holes in it it is still the #1 target of script kiddies and real hackers.

IE6 is the Chevy Chase of browsers. At one point in the past, popular, everybody liked it and it did a good job. Now, it’s outdated, nobody likes it and it just can’t do the job any longer. It’s time for IE6 to retire.

I’ll Know It When I See It

December 28, 2008 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

While looking through the stories my friend Robbie had shared via Google reader, Bring me a different rock caught my eye.

Robbie and I worked together for a couple of years at a big corporation that was sometimes often afflicted by the “wrong rock” type of thinking.

This is a game where you attempt to guess the requirements of a manager who cannot or will not communicate his or her goals, and the best attempts to do so resemble a series of frustrating discussions where you are told that your “rock” (product, schedule, process, proposal) is not correct and you should present a new “rock” in a short time frame. The problem is, the person who is rejecting your “rock” is unable or unwilling to describe what an appropriate rock looks like, feels like, tastes like.

It’s a terrible situation for everyone involved. No one in the chain ever gets to feel good about the work they’re doing because they never feel certain that they are working on the “right rock”.

That premise reminded me of a great post by Joel Spolsky from October, 2000 about functional specifications.

The moral of the story is that when you design your product in a human language, it only takes a few minutes to try thinking about several possibilities, revising, and improving your design. Nobody feels bad when they delete a paragraph in a word processor. But when you design your product in a programming language, it takes weeks to do iterative designs. What’s worse, a programmer who’s just spend 2 weeks writing some code is going to be quite attached to that code, no matter how wrong it is.

I have tried to do web design for two clients who fell into this bucket. “No, I don’t like that, but, I’ll know it when I see it”. I’ve since learned my lesson. I can’t imagine ever working with a “I’ll know it when I see it” client again, they drain you and in the end, they never seem to “see it”.

The ideal client is one who is an expert at his business, and allows you to be the expert at yours.