This post is following a discussion with a new client on her recent visit to a museum in London, she explained at the entrance the signs were large and brief, and she was able to ventured further, deeper into the individual categories of the museum where she found the level of information more detailed, you know the dusty cabinet of fossils, and antiquities.

Let visitors navigate where they want to go, without confusing them
Very detailed level of information from the start of an experience, is too much for most users, in this example, she may have not have successfully navigated deeper into the museum archives. And the museum would have failed to entice visitors to the various areas of the museum,

It’s all about seeing how far you can get, without being too bombarded by information.

This is the same as website navigation, when you visit your next site, think about the messages you see on the page, is it clear? do you understand what it means? where will you go if you click on the button or text link?

The methods that are used signpost a web-site will affect the number of areas visitors view per visit, and the length of time they spend on each page. If they are frustrated by not knowing what page there are on, or if they cannot find the correct information they will exit the site and may not even come back.

The maps below shows how a museum is organised, the rooms, the levels, can visitors understand this map to have a relaxing, enjoyable experience?

Meeting the mental model of your users

Every visitor who comes to a web site, will have built up a mental model of how the site is organised. If the site structure or ‘information architecture’ does not meet their mental model then this leads to negative, confused feelings which ‘turns off’ the user. By testing web sites early, you can easily measure how successful you have met the needs and requirements of your users.

There has to be something very interesting on a site for someone to read an entire article or story about a subject. Normally you will have lost people by the second or third paragraph, but that’s another subject – copywriting.

We are pleased to announce the start of our free client e-guides.

In a series on monthly publications we will be publishing free e-guides for you to download for free. You are welcome to share and print these eguides amongst your company or organisation.

Who are these eguides for?

The guides are in PDF format, in a print friendly format you and colleagues can use for building up a well rounded knowledge of web trends and technologies.

Whether you are a manager, a stakeholder or you someone who is looking at making web sites work harder this collection of eguides is for you. We want to help those who are less internet-savvy through the digital minefields.

We realise that there is a huge choice of services and tools on the web to choose from, we want to be able to explain in simple terms what this means to you and how they can help you save time and money as well as increasing your productivity.

Download our first client e-guide

Our first eguide ‘what makes good copy?’ covers an often over-looked part of web sites. Well structured copy can dramatically improve the feel of your web site, and convey a message to visitors that will make clear, compelling offers. The e-guide also includes copywriting dos and dont’s, and a recipe for “good copy”.

Download what makes good copy? (PDF 419kb)

This e-guide has been written in partnership with Brighton copywriter Leif Kendall and illustration/print design by Door 22 Creative.

Future publications include

• Client e-guide to usability
• Client e-guide to monitoring your brand online
• Client e-guide to a web design project
• Client e-guide to search engine web spiders

We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have getting our ideas down to help you make ‘useful web sites for everyone’.

Published using creative commons licence

From our recent partnership with Pure360 on email marketing, I was asked to expand on my notes from the class. So here they are.

Whether you like it or not, HTML email marketing campaigns are a core requirement for any successful email marketing program.

An email campaign can boost a companies revenue by millions of pounds, for example over this Christmas period how many do you think you will receive from your favourite brands – electronics, music, etc?

Email marketing is a cheap and successful online marketing method. Cheap in relation to posting out printed flyers to every recipient. And successful by being able to measure the success of every email campaign, tracking every open time and read time for each email. HTML emails done correctly, offer a better conversion rate, and people choose HTML over plain text format more often.

So, here’s a list to help all email marketers and designers create the perfect email, and make sure it appears as you intended on your customers computers. If you feel I’ve missed any important ones, feel free to leave a comment.

Make no mistake, HTML email design and development is a complete minefield. There are very few rules that you can rely upon across all mail clients. Let’s do this:

1. USE INLINE CSS + TABLES
External and internal style sheets are ignored by a number of email clients. Back to the old school with tables too. Yes, it means going back to 1999 coding, and does make the code heavy, but it means you can guarantee locking down the styles to be correct in the ‘majority’ of email clients.

2. EMAIL TEMPLATES
Unless you have extensive personal experience to draw on,
you’re most likely going to want start with a template that gets most of the fundamentals right. Save yourself some time, get some inspiration and free templates here:

• carbon graffiti
• campaign monitor gallery

3. USE ABSOLUTE DIMENSIONS
In pixels for all measurements. For example, give images and tables exact pixel dimensions – so the browser knows exactly how to display it. Email clients are not as forgiving as web browsers.

4. THE DESIGN
The width of the email design to be no more than 600 pixels wide, so the full width of the email can be seen in the view port in email preview mode.

5. ACCESSIBILITY
Make sure it is readable, with images turned off does the email make sense? By default images are not displayed in most email clients (unless you have added the address to your contacts), also not creating the best look for your company.

Image of email in web-mail client (Gmail) – notice that the email doesn’t make much sense with the images turned off? This can be improved by adding copy to the ALT attribute in the html code:

• Use Alt attributes
• Use anchor link as well to take people to important subheadings in your email
• Last resort – have a prominent link to your web version of the same email

6. FANTASTIC COPYWRITING
Attention grabbing headlines that will make users want to read more and click through. The attention grabbing information should be already visible in the viewport area when the email loads, very few people will scroll – like on web pages unless they like the information, drawing them down the page.

Image of email in web-mail client (Thunderbird) – notice that even with the images turned off the email still reads well, with the headline drawing you into the main content of the email. Simple design, yet to the point and easy to read, effective.

7. CSS SUPPORT IN EMAIL CLIENTS
Enter The email standards project.

These guys have taken the email design issue by the scruff of the neck and are actually getting Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook to take notice of the need for Email standards compliance.

Currently we grade the email clients in the following way:

The Angel’s Choir:

Strong and generally reliable HTML rendering capabilities – Thunderbird, AppleMail, and Opera Mail
You can essentially treat these mail clients as if they are normal, modern browsers.

The Muddlers:

This group includes the majority of the remaining mail clients and includes Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, and Yahoo Mail.

While you’ll probably encounter some variability in their renderings — often in text size and margins/padding – the Muddlers will generally honour your page layout.

The Legion of Doom:

Each uses their own unique but evil super-powers to subvert and destroy your HTML
Outlook 2007, Gmail, Lotus notes – rewrite CSS, padding/margins, no positioning support, removes backgrounds.

8. TESTING
Use litmusapp.com which sends back how your email looks on the following email clients:

Web-based email clients

* AOL Web
* Comcast
* Earthlink
* Gmail
* Mail.com
* MSN Hotmail
* Windows Live Hotmail
* Yahoo! Classic
* Yahoo! Mail

Desktop email clients

* AOL 9
* Lotus Notes 6.5.4
* Outlook 2003
* Outlook 2007
* Outlook Express 6
* Outlook XP
* Thunderbird
* Windows Mail (actually, what is that?)

Mobile email clients

* Blackberry
* Windows Mobile 5
* Windows Mobile 6

9 . THE FUTURE
At various sites there are thousands of new subscribers to html newsletters every single month. And those subscribers still always choose HTML over plain text at a rate of 15-20 to 1. In short, while we might not like it, your clients probably prefer HTML email, and so does their audience.

10. STICK WITH IT
Use the templates, HTML formats are here to stay so remember to keep it simple as possible, and test early and often.

Our redesign has made it onto Designm.ag titled 101 awesome portfolio sites. Alongside some world renowned web agencies and individuals: Happycog, Jason Santa-Maria, and Dan Cederholm’s Simplebits.

Disclaimer: This is someones individual opinion into current design on a variety of portfolio sites. We have not paid to be included!

However, we hope we have made it on because the copy is as eyecatching as the interface design. We are firm believers that if there is nothing to keep the visitor on your pages, then the site has failed, even though the design may have orginally caught their attention.

To keep the meme rolling, here’s 40 sites you should visit. Inspirational and Beautiful indeed!

We are proud to be collaborating with local email marketing company Pure360 on a session at The Werks based on email marketing.

Date -Thursday, August 21, 2008
Time – 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

Why are we doing this?

As email marketing has fantastic results in terms of converting new and existing customers to buy your products and learn about your company.

Reaching your customer using email newsletter campaign is still a fantastic way to encourage visits to your site. With email being still the largest social network in the world!

Sending emails has the main purpose of enhancing the relationship of a company with its current or old customers. As well as encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business no matter how large and small your business.

Researchers estimate that US firms alone spent $475 million on email marketing in 2007, as it proves to be a cost effective method of marketing and increasing sales.

Todays level of reporting combines very detailed analytics that measure the effectiveness of every campaign you send out. This and more will be discussed on the evening.

Register on upcoming at the Email Marketing Masterclass page.

Notes from Internet World 2008, containing some useful statistics on email newsletter metrics.

This is still a valuable tool for reaching customers, and it is quite difficult to lose money in email marketing. The question is how to we measure the visitor statistics successfully. There are a number of US and UK companies that provide the mailout and reporting using spam filter friendly servers so a higher proportion of emails get delivered.

The mere fact that companies send emails to customers, regardless of the fact if they are opened or not leads to brand impact and awareness of the company and its services.
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This article I written originally for the Insight Guide – A monthly Lifestyle Magazine for readers in Brighton and surrounding areas. The article gives newcomers to mobile internet a reason to take its future seriously and look ahead to what’s coming soon on the mobile platform.

There is only one web, the principle of making the same information and services to users regardless of the way they access it. No doubt about it, the number of mobile devices we choose to interact with websites and online applications is increasing, comared to just desktop computers. Mobile will revolutionise they way we gather and intereact with information in the next 2 years, and this is using the mobile in your pocket, not just the iPhone.
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