With more people using mobile devices to communicate, it’s now even easier for them to vent their frustrations with a company online. Customer complaints can quickly go viral, as JPMorgan found out when they cancelled a November Q&A session over Twitter, using #AskJPM. The idea immediately backfired as angry tweeters responded with a flurry of negative comments.
A new year means a new Color of The Year! A beautiful new COTY has been unveiled by PANTONE® to help inspire design in every industry. Pantone's choice for 2013 is Emerald, a color that encompasses freshness and clarity and is sure to make an impact.
Here at Fishpunt, we love to streamline workflows and organizational systems by consciously connecting different aspects of psychology, design, and functionality into everything we do. We have found that if we put a little more thought into the systems that we already have in place, such as color-coding, we can come up with more uses for these systems than were originally intended.
We offer six services that are interrelated yet separate, with their own divisions within our company. In order to simplify and organize these potentially overwhelming services, we have color-coded them. Designating one color to each section, or ‘color-coding’, is not a new concept and has been used for a long time. We chose to go a step further with color coding and incorporated color theory into the system as well. Below is a list of our services with the colors we chose for each section of our business and why we chose these particular colors.
We chose teal for our Graphic Design services because this color is associated with creativity and individuality. It is also associated with change and sharing due to it’s shifting nature between blue and green. This allows for broader connections facilitating creativity through open-mindedness. All of these aspects are represented in graphic design, from creating individuality through logo design, to expressing creativity in marketing ads.
Navy blue is associated with trust, wisdom, power, and dependability. Blue in general is a great color for marketing as it is the most favorite chosen color. When looking at Marketing as a whole, we feel that the main component to marketing is creating trust through multiple conscious and subconscious interactions with your audience. Within this context, using blue allows us to create trust and authority with this service on a subconscious level, making consumers more receptive.
Red is an attention-grabbing color, associated with exciting the senses. We chose red for our Printing section because this is an area of our business we like to highlight. Our Printing services are important to us because they regularly interconnect with the other services we provide, such as Graphic Design and Marketing. Using red to highlight Printing allows this most commonly used service to be most visible within our services.
The color purple is associated with royalty, luxury, and wealth. Video Production tends to be more costly than other services we provide. Within the context of web, videos are not always necessary for marketing within every industry, but they can be a beneficial luxury. We chose purple for our Video Production services because we feel that this is a luxury service.
Web Development is another area of our business we really like to highlight. Yellow is the brightest color in the spectrum and is used to grab attention. We also liked the connection between yellow and construction(yellow hard hats, yellow construction signs, yellow equipment, ect.), as Web Development is a process of constructing an application for web.
Green is associated with fitness, growth, freshness, and health. Web Optimization is the process of eliminating excess(fitness) while expanding relevant areas(growth) with new(fresh) targeted content within a website. Web Optimization allows any website the opportunity to make their website more streamlined, creating a ‘healthier’ website. We chose green for this section because of the connections we make to the health of the sites and their optimization for web.
In short, we have not reinvented the wheel with color-coding our different services. What we have done is use a well-know organizational system in combination with psychology. Not only were we able to organize six overlapping sections of our business for better in-house use and client navigation, but we have added the element of subconscious, color-coded messages about our services that every human can decode readily, whether aware of it or not.
At the beginning of this year, Google made a change to their algorithm to eliminate duplicate content and attempt to find and give credit to the original author. This was in effort to fight the war on spam websites that are getting search engine ranking by copying good quality content and bumping the original page down in search results.
After extensive testing, Google has decided to change their desktop layout by making it similiar to their mobile versions. Seeing this decision from a website giant is significant confirming that both research behind brand consistancy and UX web design make a difference. The internet is still growing and has become important tool to our society. According to this report, 65% of teachers agree "the internet makes today’s students more self-sufficient researchers". As the demand for quality continues to rise, there will always be room for improvement on websites.
Google reported this update yesterday and said:
"It’s going out to Google.com users in the U.S. to start, and we want to get it to users in other languages and regions as soon as we can. We hope you enjoy this design refresh — let us know what you think on our Google+ page."
Have you seen a drop in ranking as of this week? It could mean that you have been affected by the latest Panda update by Google. Since April of this year we have seen a rollercoaster ride for SEO firms with all of the tweaks that Google is doing to fight in the war on spam. The initial Panda update came out in February 24, 2011 and has affected about 35% of search queries.
Continuation of Building a web design for conversion - Part 1: Analytics
In our last post, we focused primarily on analyzing the facts of what a majority of visitors like from your current website. At this stage we will be discussing the process of designing for conversion. To get started on the design, we need to understand what the visitors typically do on your site. For example purposes, we will focus on our recent site revamp for reference.
If you are doing research on optimizing your website or trying to get more traffic, then I am sure you have seen repeated information on the importance of "content optimization". Many individual's biggest fear is creating relevant content that is both informative for the audience as well as ranked by search engines. A few of the most common fears with writing good quality content that businesses run into is lack of time, subject, and purpose.
So why all the fuss about content, and why do search engines require content optimization to be successful?
Search engines strive to be as human as possible, creating intricate algorithms that try to mimic human behavior and thought. But in the end, an algorithm is still just a program that sorts massive amounts of data with signals. What you really need to understand is how search engines work in order to find the purpose of your website.
Because search engine algorithms have been created to function as humans, the focus of the algorithm is to see things as a human visitor would, therefore gearing your content toward things your particular audience is interested in would make your content have a higher ranking on search engines. Knowing your audience's needs creates a purpose. Finding the purpose of your business is the key that will help unlock direction of the content. Once you have a purpose, it is only a matter of choosing subjects and writing content that deal with that audience's needs.
An example of this could be made of a lawyer's website that specializes in DUI cases. We could begin by stating that the purpose of this particular lawyer's site is to generate traffic for 'DUI' cases. Now we can create subjects out of this purpose by writing content on 'DUI Defense Strategies', or 'DUI Manslaughter', for example. Both of these subjects are relevant to the kind of information people tend to look for while searching for help with DUI cases. Both of these subjects would be great content pieces that would help this site's search engine ranking simply through relevancy to the audience's needs.
Unique, inspiring, fun, informative, educational, useful, beneficial; content is king, and all the rest of that crap are just puff pieces. In order to even begin thinking about "Google's Quality Guidelines", you need to think about your audience's needs. Interacting with a website is somewhat of a one sided experience, and you need to cater to this by providing information your potential audience will need, want, or use.
Now that you fully understand the fear of owning a website, let's talk about how to conquer that fear. It all begins with building an outline or 'hierarchy' of the information that your audience would normally ask for.
Once you have the core of that information done, you can easily expand into other areas of importance, such as explaining detailed information on how specific products/services work and why the reader would need it.
With this system in place it becomes significantly faster and easier to write subjects with relevant content that allows your website to tap into a niche audience that already exists, while simultaneously raising your ranking and fulfilling the need of a particular audience.
Once you find the purpose and create a hierarchy of subjects, developing the content and finding time become easier.
There is no better experience for a web visitor, than for them to want more information and being able to find it without having to go to another site. Think about what users might want more of.
A good SEO strategy focuses on providing relevant and informative content for your target audience. Developing a complete outline of everything that your audience wants is key. The more focus the site has on catering to an audiences' needs, the better your rankings will be.
Congratulations! You have taken the first steps towards building a successful SEO strategy.
When it comes to website redesign there are a few marketing factors we analyze for an existing website. The first step is to have a good analytics tool installed on the server to provide specific conversion data that will help decide what works and what does not work. We implement Google Analytics and Crazy Egg for about 14-30 days depending on the current flow of traffic.
Did you lose significant traffic between April 19th (Panda 3.5) and April 24th (Penguin)? Your site may have been affected by the infamous Google algorithm updates that occur every few months; we definitely got affected along with some of top Orlando web design competitors.
