7 more steps for successful online advertising March 26, 2008

As a follow up to my article “Four Steps to Successful Banner Ads“, it’s only apt that I address some best practices that should be followed for online advertising in general. From a usability point of view it is necessary to follow these best practices so that user’s are attracted to your ad and actually click it.

Target your audience
In order to drive traffic to your website the first step would be to identify a target audience and build your ad accordingly. For this you will have to take into consideration the relevance of your ad to your customers. Advertise only in areas where your business or service is available. Your ad should be clear and concise and have your company’s name in it.

Dove targetted real women without regard to age, shape, height or nationality, replacing the customary statuesque supermodels in this ad campaign.

Use keywords to narrow down customers
When you use specific keywords in your ad, you automatically weed out those who aren’t your customers. On the other hand it lets your customers know that your ad is relevant to them.

Focus on your product/business’ strengths
Highlight a special feature or a unique offer that your product or business has to offer. This will help you stand out from the rest of the competition. Make sure you include your brand name/logo in your ad. This helps give the customer a sense of trust in the brand.

Giving information about your product along with displaying the company’s logo will help the customer trust your brand

Keep it simple
Keep your ad simple, easy to read and grasp. Avoid the use of jargon, long sentences and complex punctuation. Do not attempt to advertise your product entirely in the ad. Leave the user enough curiosity to click the ad and read more

Four steps to successful banner ads March 17, 2008

This week am working on a project that includes banner ads. These need to promote the brand of the company on its website.

The question was: What kind of features should an ad have to help catch the attention of users and increase sales as well. Online Ads have to follow certain Best Practices in order to be profitable.

Primarily these Ads need to reflect the brand of the company while being effective at sales. On the other hand they should also be able to measure the attitude of the customer with regard to the brand.

A quantitative way to gauge the effectiveness of the banner ad would be pretty simple. Web metrics can capture the number of clicks that a banner attracts. Companies generally experiment with combinations of banner size, color and layout to get the best response from customers in terms of clicks.

However online banner ads cannot be considered successful based on clicks alone. The customers feel and attitude towards online banners is just as important if not more.

“As online marketers, we underestimate the level of commitment involved when a consumer clicks through to a website. The consumer is making several assessments in the blink of an eye — will this be a waste of time? Will the site I click to be safe? Will the information I seek be relevant? Will I get what I need efficiently? There is a risk vs. reward scenario that we all play out when deciding to interact with an online advertisement. If we rely too heavily on the website destination to do our talking, we will likely find that no one will be around to listen.”

- Scott Meldrum

10 User Centered Design blogs you ought to read December 6, 2007

Just thought I’d share my favorite UCD blogs with you. These are sites I read to keep in touch with the research on usability. They also make for very interesting reading.

Experience Dynamics: Frank spiller’s blog is something that every User experience professional should read. Frank has the happy knack to hitting the nail on the head with every post. Very practical info out there.

Boxes and Arrows:  In the words of David Moore, Boxes and Arrows is an “Intelligent peer-written journal on information architecture and user-centered design. Lots of practical information as well as conceptual back-up”.

Seven87: With a unique outlook on usability, marketing and customer experience, Charlie Nichols presents usability in a business environment.

Webword: John S. Rhodes operates the WebWord Blog, providing

Web 2.0 Master’s Degree! November 29, 2007

Apparently I have earned myself a master’s degree in Web 2.0! You might wanna try it out yourself… its fun. You get to figure out the trademark features of web 2.0 sites. It will make you think for sure!

Information Architecture simplified November 17, 2007

Our user experience team in office decided to form a small group that promotes the awareness and usage of usability. With this focus, we got to work brainstorming on the best way to put usability, interaction design and information architecture, in laymen’s terms.

We decided the best way to do this would be to start a newsletter. For the articles, we came up with the theme of “Weave a story”,

Free icon sets, fonts for the designer October 29, 2007

Take a look at these resources of free icon and font sets.  Its the designer’s proverbial pot of gold. Whats more… there are pointers to places where you can find even more.

Iconsets

Silk Icons: “Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons. There are a large variety of icons, you’re sure to find something that tickles your fancy. The USP of this iconset is that they are too neat to ignore.

Sweetie Icons: Another adorable set of pixel icons with the relevant photoshop files included. 

The design curve October 28, 2007

When there is a site to design, there are a lot of people who become information architects at the drop of a hat. Everyone considers himself/herself an expert on the topic. All of a sudden the designer becomes a mere puppet and is reduced to someone who simply executes everyone’s ideas in the form of a web page.

Matthew Inman in an article on http://www.seomoz.org/ calls this the design curve. According to him the more the wrong kinds of people get involved with the process, the worse the design gets.

CSS styled tables October 26, 2007

Tables can be a nightmare to deal with, especially because they have become the mainstay of many a developer who throws the standards to the winds. Of course if tables are used to do what they are meant to do, displaying tabular data, they can make life a lot easier.

 Enter TABLECLOTH. Table cloth takes good well formed code and applies styling and behavior to it and voila!!! You have a styled and active table.

Other css styled tables

 The ever enterprising Veerle has a css styled table of her own. http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/a_css_styled_table/

An excellent example of a striped table is available at Validweb http://validweb.nl/artikelen/javascript/better-zebra-tables/

Intricately beautiful backgrounds October 25, 2007

There are some websites that you probably just visit for the eye candy. I know I do

I bumped into this post by Andrew Faulkner, who happened to list some of my favorite blogs.

http://joshuaink2006.johnoxton.co.uk/
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/

You can actually imagine how much work has gone into these beautiful creations. I never tire of visiting these websites.

Fresh color schemes at your fingertips September 29, 2007

Have you ever hit a dead end when it came to choosing a color scheme for your website or logo? No worries. There’s this nifty little site called Daily Color Scheme, that is purely dedicated to color.