We recently redesigned the website of Day & Night Family Dental, located at www.DayAndNightDental.com.

Day & Night Family Dental is a cosmetic and family dentist in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

The impetus for the website redesign was to increase the new practice’s patient volume. After putting up a quick, rudimentary website, Day & Night Family Dental sought a more user-friendly, branded solution for its online marketing. They wanted a purposeful web presence that would increase the volume and quality of their new patient leads.

In order to help the practice achieve its goal, we designed and developed a new website that implemented best practices learned from years of experience generating leads for healthcare companies.

We also ran the website through a focus group of potential patients in the practice’s demographic to get feedback and make the website more useful.

Website content was re-architected and re-written to help ensure that visitors can find the website via search engines, and that when they visit the website, they find it relevant and easy to understand.

We paid careful attention to the technical aspects of the project, too.  The website was coded with mobile web visitors in mind. When people visit the website with a tablet or smartphone, the website automatically reformats itself in order to maintain readability and usability.

Day & Night Family Dental is pleased with their new website and the increase in patients resulting from it.  Practice staff are seeing a heavy, steady stream of relevant email and phone leads from the website, which can all be measured with website analytics and phone call tracking.

We’re getting more and more requests here at RWC about mobile apps and mobile websites.  I had a conversation last week with an editor of a medical publication about mobile web browsing, and he asked me if we could develop a mobile app for his publication.

But did his publication need an app or a mobile website?

I quickly turned the discussion into whether he needed a mobile app or a mobile website.  Like many, he didn’t know there was a distinction between the two.

Making the differentiation, though, is important. A mobile website is meant to deliver content in a way that is properly formatted for reading on a mobile phone, while an app typically has a more focused objective — a content aggregator, a game, a social sharing tool — something with a single function.

A mobile website can use content from a website’s existing content management system and format that content in a mobile-friendly format — a narrower interface to fit the narrow screen, larger type, and simplified design for easier reading on a phone or tablet.  Because it can pull in content from an existing content management system, a company’s marketing department only has to update content once in order to update the website and the mobile site.

Because a mobile website is platform independent, once it’s developed, it works on the iPhone, iPad and Android phones.  There’s no need to develop multiple mobile websites, saving time and development expense.

An app, on the other hand, is coded for a specific device.  There are Android apps for Android phones, iPhone apps for the iPhone, iPad apps for the iPad and Blackberry apps for Blackberry devices.  Note that most iPhone apps will also work on the iPad, but will be formatted for the smaller iPhone screen.

A final advantage of a mobile website is that content in mobile websites is searchable (via search engine) while mobile app content is not searchable.  When people search the web from their smartphones, search engines are getting wise and often show preference to mobile websites, giving your company an opportunity for better search engine visibility.

If your company wants to re-format your website for a mobile device, then you need a mobile website, not an app. Need a mobile website?  Fill out the form to the right or contact us here.

photo credit: blakespot

Who needs a large sales force when your company website can do the hard work for you? Both B2B and B2C companies are realizing the need to make their websites more effective and optimize them to generate qualified leads.

So where can you start your optimization efforts? These seven universal optimization techniques will vault your online lead generation efforts into overdrive.

Reduce distractions, reduce clutter

People really do care what your website looks like, especially if they can’t find what they’re looking for.   Making your website easier to use starts with removing distractions and unnecessary visual elements.  Identify over-designed elements on key pages and eliminate or redesign them.  If you want more leads from your website, think about ways to simplify and cut the clutter so people can actually find (and easily read) the information they seek.

Include a call to action on every page

Individual web pages should have a singular purpose. The copy, graphics, and page elements should reinforce that purpose, and including a prominent call to action will help entice people to take the next step.  In case you’re wondering, linking to a contact page with the words “click here” isn’t enough.  Don’t assume that your sales prospects will know how your product or service will benefit them — specifically state in a customer-focused way how they will benefit from your product or service.

Improve website navigation

Too many websites have “content silos,” or sections of a website that can only be navigated by using primary website navigation.  If you don’t interlink content on your website, you’re missing out on an opportunity. Not only will linking to other content on your site improve your website’s SEO, it will allow people to navigate your site better and learn more about the benefits of your products and services.  Visitors may also learn about products or services they didn’t even knew you offered, and it will keep them on your website longer, giving you more of an opportunity to convince them to contact your company.

Add a contact form on nearly every page

Rather than making people hunt for a small “Contact” link, add a contact form on nearly every page of your website.  Forms take up more real estate so they are easier to find, and we’ve seen during website testing that people’s eyes are naturally drawn to forms.

Be sure to keep contact forms simple.  The initial contact is not the place to ask detailed questions. Capture only essential information.

Perform usability testing to identify incremental design and content changes

Usability testing is crucial to improving your website.  Testing your website with real people in your target demographic helps find design flaws and weak content.  During usability tests, you’ll often find that participants will ask questions or make comments that can give you ideas to improve your website design and copy.  For extra ideas, test your competitors’ websites as well.

You don’t have to redesign your entire website to make usability improvements. In many cases, changing just a few things at a time can help you fine-tune the effectiveness of a page or page template.

Analyze website usage

I can’t stress the value of website analytics enough. Too many business managers simply look at website traffic and shrug off the rest.  You must realize that actually analyzing your website data can dramatically affect your bottom line.  Don’t know where to begin?  Identify pages with high bounce rates or exit rates and make a list of potential things that could be causing people to leave those pages.

If you don’t have time for a deep dive into your web analytics or don’t have the skills to do it, hire a professional analyst.  True case study: One of our ecommerce clients hired us to diagnose an ecommerce conversion rate problem.  An analysis revealed that few people were adding items to their shopping cart.  We noticed that most of the search engine traffic searched for phrases including “cheap” and “free.”  We set up a segment that excluded those searches, and the rate at which people added items to their shopping cart was almost 3 times higher!  With just web analytics, we found that they had optimized their website for the keywords that attracted the wrong kind of shopper.

Put your phone number on every page of your website

This almost goes without saying, but placing your phone number on every page of your website prevents prospects from having to hunt for it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that everyone prefers email.  70 percent of one client’s sales leads come in by phone!

It’s also important to track phone calls originating from your website.  Installing phone call analytics on your company website does more than just let you know how many people are calling from your website.  It also can tell you how many calls were not answered or went to voice mail, what time of day or what days of the week most of your sales calls occur, what zip codes calls originate from, which online advertisements are the most effective and much more.

Do you want to find out how real customers use your website?  Do you need a deep analysis of your website usage to diagnose website issues?  Do you want to start tracking phone calls originating from your website?  Perhaps your company website may need a website redesign.  We can help — contact us here.

We’ve always avoided doing spec work. No one likes to work for free, and neither do we.  When we get an RFP that requires a homepage design as part of the proposal, we set it aside.  Website design is usually worth what you pay for it.

The single most important reason that we don’t do spec web design work is that we must understand the goals and objectives of the website.  Our clients hold us accountable for the effectiveness — and in some cases specific metrics — of their websites. Knowing clients’ objectives ahead of time is the only way to create a website that gets the desired results.

Good web design requires planning.  Before we open Photoshop, we like to complete a research and planning phase.  We find competing websites and analyze the websites for clues as to what the company or organization is good at (and where areas they’re weak in).  We look at the way they communicate content and use the functionality they present to users.  We look at the photography they use on their websites, and sometimes this gives us insight into the types of audiences that they’re trying to reach.

Designing an effective website requires that the designer know the audience or audiences their client is trying to communicate with. Before the design work begins, we typically will create personas or fictional characters that fit the profile of the people that will use the website.  We try to understand what content they seek, what functionality they will find useful and how they will interact with the company or organization.

Spec work also exposes a design firm to theft of intellectual property.  Every designer I know has a story of a time they provided a free web design with a proposal, only to find out the company used the design without compensation after rejecting the proposal.

Website design is much more than eye candy and artwork — it’s creating a strategic finely-tuned marketing tool.  We find that we work best with companies and organizations that are willing to trust the strength of our portfolio or the referral of a satisfied client. For that reason, we avoid spec design entirely.

I came across an interesting article in my RSS reader last week, and since it’s a sales blog, the headline instantly caught my eye — Seemingly Little Mistakes That Cost You Big Opportunities. When reading the section about doing a poor diagnosis or needs analysis, I couldn’t help but think about how the same mistake is made in planning websites.

We put in a lot of time up-front meeting with clients and discussing a project while quoting it — long before we send the proposal or win the job. Some of my peers think I’m crazy for doing this work up-front, and I even know of one firm that charges for quoting jobs.

Fact is, most companies and organizations think they know what they want, but we as designers and developers know that when we learn more about a project, there are more opportunities to build a better, more technologically sound site than clients know about.

Doing research and having meetings with prospects up-front is worth the time because a) it will never cause us to lose the job, b) we can help the client understand possible ways to meet their goals that they may not have thought of, and c) we develop a rapport with the client. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership.

To us, web design, development and online marketing requires significant planning and analysis. It’s the foundation of a well-planned project. This prevents re-work during the approval phase and in the end, gives our clients a solution that will often exceed their expectations.

Do you need a firm that is willing to immerse themselves in your business? Contact us.

With the release of the iPad this past weekend, many web design companies and consultants like us are scrambling to test client web sites on the iPad. Here’s an online application that lets you see your web site on the iPad and what you need to look for.

To see your web site on the iPad, simply go to ipadpeek.com and type in the address of your web site in the site’s iPad interface. Viola!

So what should you be looking for?

• Do your Flash applications work properly?
  The iPad runs the Safari web browser and does feature full Flash support, but you should test your Flash site or application to make sure it renders properly.
• Where’s the “fold?”
  When we design web sites, we pay special attention to where the first screen of content ends. We try to design key pages so that the screen ends while cutting some text or graphics in half so there’s a visual cue to scroll.You look at key pages on your web site to see that this convention has not been broken. If the iPad shows the site differently than you intend it to, you may need to make adjustments accordingly.
• Do your forms work properly?
  While there’s no reason to think they would not, you might want to run a few form test submissions to make sure nothing is broken.

Lately, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about marketing lead generation. For many companies, the economy has really caused slumping sales. Some are responding by stepping up their sales efforts, and the most intelligent companies are improving their web sites to generate more leads.

There’s one simple yet often overlooked step your company can take to generate more leads from your web site: include a contact form on key pages. On our site, key pages are the pages that talk about the web consulting services we offer and, not surprisingly, the contact page.

Companies typically have a single contact link or button at the top or bottom of their web sites. But why make your readers hunt for a place to contact you? By putting a short, simple lead generation form beside or at the bottom of your web pages, you’re giving people an easy way to make contact.

Many web designers will argue that you don’t need the form — that it “junks” up a design. If that’s the case, ask them to create a second version of a key web page (perhaps a whitepaper download, a sales page, a product page, etc.) with a form included and use a testing tool like Google’s Website Optimizer to test the page with the form against the page without. This head-to-head comparison will reveal which is more effective.

In nearly every case I’ve seen, the page with a form will generate more leads than a page without a form. There are exceptions, such as requiring that someone fill out a form before downloading, viewing or listening to content.

By placing lead generation forms on key pages of your company web site, you might just be able to thrive during this recession.

Having worked on a content-rich sites my entire career, including managing design for an over 750,000-page behemoth early in my career, I’ve learned a lot about how to approach planning large web sites.

Here are some tips that we’ve included in our Analysis phase of projects to make planning a big site go smoothly.

Leave enough time in your schedule for a thorough analysis

When redesigning or designing a new site, it‚’s all too common that a designer opens Photoshop first. I tell clients that for the first few weeks of a project, I don’t open Photoshop or any other design tool. That’s because I want to know about the goals and audience of the new site first. I also want to analyze the current site and make recommendations for new content and functionality.

Take inventory of all existing site content

While there are some tools available to map out a site, I find there’s no substitute for clicking through a site manually, making a sitemap in Excel, and taking note of a site’s interaction points. Our site maps contain the page name, the URL, and any other notes that I want to make about a page. Typically, these notes contain things I want to fix, ideas for re-organization, or reminder notes. The entire spreadsheet is arranged hierarchically so I know how “deep” the site is and where content is currently organized.

Conduct a competitive analysis

Find companies or organizations that are similar to yours and make note of how they organize content, what functions they have on their web site, any interesting user experience cues, etc.

I typically include a tab on my content inventory spreadsheet for ideas that I get while doing competitive research and audience research.

Spend time understanding the audiences and/or conduct usability testing

We often spend a great deal of time with our clients understanding their core audiences, then conduct research online about these audiences so we know what messages resonate with them, what features they expect, and their general web browsing patterns and habits.

Usability testing can inform our analysis process as well. Watching real customers use your web site will point out much more than trouble spots with your web site. Usability testing can also reveal user patterns, such as how long they look for information, how they read the screen, scrolling patterns and much, much more.

Get approval on new content and functions

Organize your ideas into a presentation and show your boss, quickly highlighting the trouble spots on the old site, your new ideas, and how they will improve the bottom line. When pitching your ideas, you need to think like a CEO – are they likely to impact sales or generate leads, or is the content/function just a “bell and whistle” that will take up too much development time and generate no return on the investment?

Make a new site map

You’re now familiar with the existing content and the new content and functionality you’ll add, so diagram a new site map. We do this with good ‘ol pen and paper. I start with some temporary “level 1″ items — the items that will appear in the navigation. I then put content into these buckets, often many levels deep.

After a significant amount of examination to make sure the navigation makes sense, I decide on things like dropdown navigation, search, and many other nuances of organizing the site. All these are communicated to the designer during the design phase.

# # #

I usually go a step farther, diagramming related content so as we design and build the site, we can avoid dead-ends and make sure the web site visitor stays engaged.

Hopefully sharing these tips will make your web site planning process smoother. In my experience with client work, following these steps help ensure that your design and development efforts will be well-informed and focused on hitting goals. After all, that’s the real reason to re-design.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on development for IE 6, I thought it might be appropriate to show you how to know if IE 6 (or any browser, for that matter) should be a consideration for your web development project. Here‚’s how to know.

I‚Äôve worked in quite a few development environments, from the big corporation (Circuit City, RIP), to small but successful e-commerce ventures (Crutchfield Corporation), and at a government-funded non-profit (United Network for Organ Sharing). While each organization had different testing guidelines, I didn’t notice a structured approach to why web sites/applications should be tested with certain browsers.

As our testing methodology has evolved at Rick Whittington Consulting, I’ve put a lot of thought into why certain browsers have to be tested. Simply put, here’s what I’ve found:

You must know your audience.

So how do you do that? I start with Google Analytics. Studying the Visitors > Browser Capabilities reports for a 6-month period for a given web site can give you insight into what should be tested. As a guide, any browser/browser version that has over 0.5% share, we test for.

That means that for really techie, Mac-oriented sites, we may test Camino, but not with a consumer e-commerce site with a more senior audience. If we’re testing code for a business application that has a defined audience, IE 6 and IE 7 are the focus, but not Opera.

What about mobile phone users? People are increasingly using their phone to surf the web. Again, we turn to Google Analytics. On one B2B-oriented site we‚Äôre currently working on, we can see that people are visiting using the Safari for iPhone, Safari for Android, Blackberry browser, PalmOS, and even using Safari on iPod. We got this data using Google Analytics’ Visitors > Browser Capabilities > Browsers and OS report. In most cases (both B2B and B2C), Safari for iPhone and Blackberry will be the two most widely-used mobile browsers).

Do the due diligence to see what browsers customers are using and your site won’t have nearly the browser display issues that most sites on the web do (I’m still looking at you, Verizon Wireless).

I read a terrific blog post recently at QuirksMode called ‚”State of the Browsers — IE edition.” Aside from predicting the future usage of IE browser versions, the article called for web developers to charge extra for IE 6 support.

Why is IE 6 so slow to die? The answer — corporate intranets. Corporate intranets are often built on antiquated technology, and unlike public sites, they aren’t frequently re-developed since ROI is lower. They aren’t going away, so people that browse at work will continue to use IE 6.

Why would a web development firm charge 20-30% more for the development of a site to include IE 6 support?

We develop sites to support IE 6 nearly all of the time, but it takes significantly more time since IE 6 doesn’t fully support today’s web standards. What looks great on other browsers can look terribly broken in IE 6. In nearly every case, we have to create a special stylesheet specifically for IE 6.

Since we’re testing on IE 6, IE 7 and now IE 8, there’s also significant hardware and software costs. As far as I’m aware, there is no way to have all three browsers on a single install of Windows.’ To fully test, you’ll need three Windows licenses and three computers. That’s a lot of added cost when I can use one machine to test all of the other browsers.

Update on July 29, 2009: Thanks to some feedback on Twitter and some further probing, I found a nice article called 13 Ways to Browser Test and Validate Your Work that mentions a couple of applications that allow for testing in multiple IE browser versions (see ways 9 & 10 in the article). Internet Explorer Collection allows for testing in multiple standalone versions of Internet Explorer.

IE 6 isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s always best to examine your web analytics to determine if a significant number of people are using IE 6 to access a site. If you’re re-developing your public web site and you require IE 6 support, be prepared to pay slightly more for development costs.

Since many small businesses (especially in today’s economy) don’t want to spend a fortune on testing and research, I was pleased to see Marketing Sherpa‚Äôs brilliant new article called “Case Study: Increase Conversions with Simple Site Redesign: 7 Steps‚” (you can read this article and see creative examples for free until April 15th). The article provides some great advice to companies looking to test redesigns on the cheap.

The key to testing on the cheap is knowing what the problems with the current page are — usually identified through your web analytics — then incrementally redesigning the page and asking for input.

By pulling together a “best customer” list (I define ‚”best customers” as repeat customers or long-time customers) and asking them to provide input on your web page designs, you‚’re not only getting free advice directly from real customers — you’re engaging them and telling them that you value them as customers.

We did this in late 2008 during the Virginia Favorites web site redesign. Virginia Favorites has a best customer list they regularly promote exclusive offers to, and we sent them a link to a hidden web address for the new web site and asked them for feedback.

The e-mail we sent offered customers an exclusive sneak peak at the redesign that addressed features they had been asking for. If they completed a survey, they’d immediately receive a 10% off coupon. The SurveyMonkey survey the customers were asked to complete included specific questions about the design and an open-ended question for general comments.

We received many comments from this “focus group” and we made some tweaks to the new site based on the feedback.

The cost of the testing was minimal, and the conversion rate of the new site is over double the conversion rate of the old site (and higher than the industry average conversion rate).

Inexpensive testing works, and is a great solution for companies that don’t want to dedicate thousands of dollars to formal lab testing or focus groups.

When we take on a web development project or web site build, one service we provide to customers “out-of-the-box” is to code their web site so that it can be easily viewed on mobile devices. Here’s how we do it.

For starters, this is just a basic checklist — one that we generally follow on all projects. I‚’m not saying this list is exhaustive, but if you code web sites using the techniques below, customers viewing the site on mobile devices will thank you.

1. Use CSS to separate HTML code from presentational code and choose HTML tags carefully. First, this means that we keep the HTML markup as simple as possible. The CSS that styles the code is kept in separate files and we don’t use inline styles unless there’s a good reason to do so. Because viewing a web site on a BlackBerry is like looking at a web site with all styles turned off, we pay special attention to which HTML tags we use — specifically unordered lists, ordered lists, paragraphs, etc.
2. Add the company name in plain text near the top of the page. This can be done a lot of ways, from using image replacement techniques that replace the logo with the company name to including the company name in a hidden <div> at the top of the page. Note: the proper way to hide a <div> is to use a negative text indent, not set the display to “none” if you still want people using screen readers or search engines to see the content.
3. Put a “skip to content” link at the top of every page. In the header, or just above it, we usually insert a <div> that we hide with CSS (therefore only shown to those with mobile devices that don’t read CSS). Inside this div we put a link that says “skip to content” so visitors on mobile devices can skip the header and navigation without having to scroll.
4. Put the company address, phone number and e-mail address near the top of every page. In the same hidden <div> we put the “skip to content” link in, we usually include the company address and phone number. You can link the address to Google Maps so a visitor on-the-go can find you via map, and we format the phone number like ###-###-#### so it appears as a link to BlackBerry users. They can simply click it to call the company.
5. Place a “back to top” link at the bottom of every page. In a hidden <div> at the bottom of every page, we insert a “back to top link” that takes the visitor to the top of the page. Again, this is so visitors don’t have to manually scroll all the way to the top of the screen.

While these 5 tips are just a starting point, they will go a long way to making your site more usable on mobile devices. Of course, iPhone users and BlackBerry Storm users see pages with full graphics and text, but many people are still on older platforms, and making your site more usable for them is possible while not affecting the screen display of a person on a desktop or laptop computer.

What other tips can you share?

Last week, we launched the new Thalhimer web site. For those not in Virginia, Morton G. Thalhimer, Inc. is a commercial real estate company based in Richmond, VA with multiple offices across the state. We redesigned and redeveloped their web site.

The process started with a full web site assessment. We analyzed how their target audience used their web site by conducting usability studies and examining web analytics. We used all of this information to complete a full visual redesign of the web site, and we redeveloped the site to make it easier for customers on both traditional screens and on mobile devices to use. The site is also easier to update — they don’t have to involve the IT group to make changes or add content.

The site uses Expression Engine to control most site content, and integrates with internal databases as well.

See the site at thalhimer.com.

When publishing articles online, there are a few guidelines that help people read your site — use bullet points, write in short paragraphs and offer an article summary. CNN’s web site, though, provides the best implementation of article summaries I’ve seen.

While I’ve seen and even recommended the approach of using article summaries before, I think CNN’s article summaries do a few things very well.

• The summary is located in the right place. The headline is large and attracts attention, and the summary is immediately to the right.
• The summary uses short, one-line bullet points
• There’s a small yet noticeable link to the next article in case the current one does not interest you.

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog post a few days ago about “the magic of low-hanging fruit” and was reminded of the power of fixing low-hanging fruit when redesigning your web site.

You see, when we perform web site assessments, the first thing we look for is low-hanging fruit. Often, fixing these small, easily identifiable issues requires little effort and produces a big return.

If you think your web site is fully-optimized, think again. I’ve yet to work on a site that doesn’t have some small issues that can be easily fixed. Understandably, some companies are reluctant to make changes. I’m currently working with a client whose site won some major awards in the early 2000′s (“back in the day”). They conducted rudimentary usability research and had a great site, but they haven’t changed anything but content since.

Now, years later, they’ve hired me to do a web site assessment. They are understandably reluctant to totally overhaul their once award-winning web site. In addition to needing some design updates, this site could benefit from fixing some low-hanging fruit to significantly improve their bottom line.

The most dramatic example I have of fixing low-hanging fruit is an e-commerce client I had about 2 years ago. The product images on his product pages were so large that they took up a normal customer’s entire screen. By shrinking the image and moving all pricing information near his add-to-cart button — all of which took 2 hours to change — site revenue improved over 60%.

I encourage you to contact us — we can identify what changes should be made to your site.

Today, we launched a new web site for an author friend of mine, Charles Jones (I call him “Chip”). Chip is a former Richmond Times-Dispatch staff writer who paid his way to Iraq last June to research this book, entitled Red, White or Yellow? The Media & the Military at War in Iraq.

The site contains a video trailer about the book, which we posted on YouTube, and a slideshow of original photos that Jones took while in Iraq. The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon and will ship in September. Congrats Chip!

Visit RedWhiteorYellow.com

I’m proud to announce the launch of a new project that’s been nearly 8 months in the making (hey, client projects always come first). Recently, we launched a newly re-designed version of the Rick Whittington Consulting web site.

While there are a lot of new features”behind-the-scenes.” I wanted to share a couple that you’ll want to take note of.

• A more integrated, improved blog
  You can now see new blog posts in relevant places on the new site (outside of the blog). You can also sign up to have blog posts e-mailed to you (just look to the right and enter your e-mail address) — a great way to receive new content! If you use an RSS feed reader, you can add our new feed to your list — it’s at http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebSiteEffectivenessBlog. If social bookmarking is your thing, you can also help me promote things I write on the blog.
• An updated portfolio
  I’l be the first to tell you that it’s embarrassing that we hadn’t updated the portfolio in nearly 2 years. I’ve updated the portfolio with new projects to better showcase our design and development capabilities. View the portfolio now.

There are also a few other behind-the-scenes capabilities that allow us to serve content based on where you’re from and how you get here. We’ll be using that soon.

Having dealt with some large organizations and different kinds of personalities in my past work, I thought I would share a tip about how to share feedback effectively with your web design firm. Admittedly, this post is not for the do-it-yourselfer, but the company that hired a web design firm to design their web site.

The design phase of any web design project solicits lots of back-and-forth communication between client and designer. The key to a successful project is to communicate in a meaningful way. Here’s what I mean:

To be effective, the designer should share why they made certain design choices and ask the client specific questions that help the designer compile good feedback. The designer should interpret client feedback and create user-friendly solutions, then document the decisions that were made and why.

The client, on the other hand, should communicate the “big picture” without being too specific. For example, designers don’t usually respond positively when told to design something a certain way. For example, telling your designer to place specific clip art on your web site will probably make your designer mad. Designers like to hear what you want to achieve, then figure out how to best design it. Hint: this probably doesn’t include cute clip art.

I encourage clients to provide a general idea of what they want, and that I reserve the right as an expert to create a few designs that a) solve your problem in the most attractive, user-friendly way and b) solve your problem in a way that I’ll be proud to display in my portfolio (and won’t embarrass your CEO at the next networking event).

Communicating effectively with your web designer and being open-minded to their design concepts will produce a design that works better and is finished quicker. Oh, yeah, and you and your designer will be happy with the end result.

You probably read this headline and scratched your head. No, the flu bug that I’m still getting over isn’t speaking to me — your customers really can help design your site. But don’t send them an email asking them to buy Photoshop just yet… Even though your customers know nothing about effective web design, there are two ways they can help you design your site.

The first is covered in GrokDotCom’s recent blog post about A/B testing. The premise is that your designer can post two versions of a page or page template, measure results and keep the page that works the best. This way, you enable your customers to indirectly tell you what they like best. Continually testing new designs doesn’t have to be time consuming or costly — it can be as easy as changing the placement, size or color of a button, or just pulling important copy out of a paragraph and making it a headline.

Second, you can conduct a usability test of your site with customers. This can be done in a lab (which can be a very expensive option), or you can test your site with remote users. There are some new options in the remote testing arena that are promising, especially for sites that have never been tested before (and nearly 77% of online retailers don’t test their sites). Remote testing, while less costly, will identify “low-hanging fruit” that you can easily fix.

No matter which you choose, you can let your customers design your site through their feedback and through the use of both quantitative and qualitative data.

The Get Elastic blog has published a good blog post on the size of add to cart and call-to-action buttons. Their advice in this article not only applies to product pages on ecommerce sites, but also to application design and screen design for non-ecommerce sites.

It’s worth a read to see how a designer works through the challenge of creating a page that helps customers navigate the web site.

The Nielsen Norman Group — a well-known group of usability experts — is kindly offering a free download of their report titled “Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.”

You’d normally drop $124 on this report, which details 75 best practices for designing web sites for those with disabilities.

In my opinion, every web site should be designed and coded with accessibility as a consideration. This report will give you the fundamentals and you’ll be able to figure out how your site stacks up. Business owners, download a copy and send it to your designer as their holiday gift.

I’ve pointed out some flaws on Verizon Wireless’ web site before, and I recently found yet another example of a flaw on the Verizon Wireless web site that could have been prevented with proper browser testing.

I visited the Verizon Wireless web site to log into my account and pay my bill online. I clicked on the “My Account” tab at the top of the Verizon Wireless homepage and got a page with the following login box:

After typing the User Name and Password into the corresponding fields, I received the following screen:

As you can imagine, this caused some confusion. Did I enter my information incorrectly? Is the feature not working currently? I had questions and picked up the phone to call customer support.

The customer service representative told me that the login was only compatible with Internet Explorer, and since I was using Firefox, I would have to switch to Internet Explorer.

Of course, this error on the Verizon Wireless web site could have been prevented with a few hours of browser testing. Here are my findings:

As you can see, 20% of web site users are likely to fail at logging into their Verizon Wireless account when using the form on the “My Account” page.

Fact: Not testing your web site on Safari and Firefox may cause failure for 20% of your customers.

According to Compete.com, VerizonWirless.com receives about 10.9 million visitors per month. While there’s no way to know what percentage of these visitors log into their Verizon Wireless accounts, let’s say for the sake of argument that 10% of site visitors log into their account (or attempt to).

In this case, that’s 1.9 million people per month attempting to log into their accounts. According to web browser usage statistics, that means that 380,000, or 20% of 1.9 million, fail at logging into their accounts each month.

Imagine the savings Verizon Wireless could realize at their call center if they properly tested this application and took the time to make it usable on the most common browsers.

Smashing Magazine, which I find to be an excellent source of information for web designers, posted some updated information today about what operating systems and web browsers people use to view the web.

The Smashing Magazine post references the W3Counter Global Stats page that tracks browser usage, operating system usage, screen resolutions, and countries. A few points to note:

• Internet Explorer version 6 is still the most popular browser (Editor’s note: It’s also the most difficult browser to code standards-compliant sites for)
• 1024×768 is the most popular screen resolution
• Only about half of people browse with their web browsers maximized, so site designs should still accommodate the 800×600 resolution unless you have data for your site that contradicts this.

It’s painfully obvious that designers (and yes, web developers too) need to test sites on Windows and Mac platforms, and using multiple browsers.

If your company uses its web site as a marketing tool or sales tool, you can’t afford not to test new things. One powerful technique to help your company make huge site improvements with a relatively small effort is the incremental redesign.

Incremental redesign doesn’t involve a total overhaul of your web site — rather, just a single page or page template. It can involve your homepage, a landing page for a paid search campaign, your e-commerce product page or even your e-mail marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say your company runs an e-commerce web site, and you think you could improve your conversion rate. Use Excel to create a simple spreadsheet and log some “control” information — the date range and conversion rate. Pick one page — in this case, a product page. The objective for this page is to convince the customer to add the product to their shopping cart, so you hypothesize that the add to cart button isn’t large and colorful enough. Make a simple change to your product page template by making the add to cart button larger and more colorful. Next, log the test date range in your spreadsheet, what change you made to the template, and the conversion rate for the date range. Having this spreadsheet allows you to compare the before and after, and make a decision as to whether you’ll keep the new add to cart button. Keep this spreadsheet up-to-date over time and it will also serve as a log of what you’ve done in the past and what results you measured from those changes.

Of course, it may take many tests before you find the right page design, but this low-cost technique can be used on almost any page of your web site or even on a landing page.

It works. Last year, an online retailer hired me to improve their conversion rate. After looking at their site, I deduced that the single biggest barrier to conversion was their product page template. A large product image took up the entire width of the page, the pricing/value proposition wasn’t clear and users had to scroll before seeing any product information. With the old page template in place, the site conversion rate was 0.91%. After the product page was redesigned, site conversion increased to 2.76%, all because we changed a single page on their site!

Often, significant improvements can be made without redesigning your entire web site. I encourage small businesses to try the cost-effective technique of incremental redesigns to improve the effectiveness of their web sites.

Web designers, take note! The folks at Campaign Monitor are undertaking the valiant effort of trying to establish baseline standards that e-mail clients should meet, and they need your input.

Campaign Monitor is asking designers to contribute ideas for what should be supported in baseline cascading style sheet standards. Go leave your comment now.

Notes for the non-technical: If you aren’t a web designer, designing and coding an e-mail is a difficult process that often involves using antiquated coding techniques because e-mail clients (i.e. Outlook, Gmail, etc.) don’t support the same types of code. Establishing standards would not only make it easier to code HTML e-mail campaigns, it would ensure proper rendering in all e-mail clients so your e-mails look as intended.