WHAT IS STRATEGIC DESIGN?
Strategic design is the fusion of your organizational goals with every aspect of your design process. You aren’t simply designing a user interface that looks good and is usable and accessible. You’re designing an interface that will help you accomplish your organization’s objectives.

There are many websites out there that look fantastic and sport the latest trends in design yet often fail miserably in their intended function. Design trends are, of course, important because they give you fresh inspiration and new techniques, but the implementation of those techniques and styles needs to be intelligent and focused. For example, a blog isn’t a marketing brochure; you should focus on usability and readability rather than style. Similarly, a promotional website for a computer game should feature graphics and styles that portray a specific feel and style; the aesthetic is very important here.

When the designer simply implements a look and feel that is fashionable at the moment (think Web 2.0 trends) without any thought of how they fit the function of the website or the business behind it, the end result is unlikely to be very effective.

Web design is all about crafting an interface that communicates function, is usable and accessible and exudes the right emotion and feeling. Effective Web design needs all of these elements to be in tune with the goals of your website and in sync with the organizational objectives behind the website. Strategic design is all about identifying those goals and using them to guide your design.

1. ESTABLISH YOUR GOALS
One of the first things you need to do before starting work on a Web design project is to be clear about your client or organization’s goals. What are you trying to achieve with the new website or redesign? What is the website’s main purpose? Ask your client, your manager or yourself what those are. If they or you don’t know yet, then they should be discussed and agreed upon. A clear direction is essential if you want your design to have a purpose.

Remember that a website isn’t a piece of art; it’s an interface that serves a function. That function may be to sell products, to deliver informational content, to entertain, to inform or to provide access to a service. Whatever that function is, your design must focus on fulfilling it. Goals are also important, especially if you’re doing a redesign. Ask why you are doing the redesign: are you looking to grow the number of sign-ups, decrease the bounce rate or maybe increase user participation?

2. IDENTITY YOUR AUDIENCE
Who your audience is will play a big role in how your website should look and function. There are many demographics here that can influence your design, ones like age, gender, profession and technical competency. A computer game website for a younger audience needs a different style than that of a serious business journal. Usability should play a bigger role for older and less technically savvy audiences.

Who your audience is will not only influence the general aesthetic of the website but will also determine a lot of smaller details, like font sizes, so make sure you’re clear about who will be using your website.

3. DETERMINE YOUR BRAND IMAGE
A lot of designers tend to get a little too inspired by the latest trends and then implement them without thinking first about what sort of image they really should be conveying. Glossy buttons, gradients and reflective floors may work for some websites, but they may not be right for your brand.

4. GOAL-DRIVEN DESIGN DIRECTION
Think about color. Think about the feel you want to achieve and emotions you wish to elicit. Your design should embody the personality and character of your brand. Everything has a brand; even if you don’t sell a product or service — for example, if you run a blog — your website still has a certain feel that makes an impression on your visitors. Decide what that impression should be.
You’ve established the purpose of your website, set some goals you want to achieve, identified your audience and determined your brand image. You can now proceed to implement it. So how do you make design decisions sync with your strategy? Let me illustrate this with a likely example.

Suppose your main objective is to increase the number of subscribers to your Web service. How can your design help accomplish this goal? I can see at least three things here that will make a difference:

* Make the “About” snippet on your landing page as clear and concise as possible. Your
visitors must not have any confusion about the function of your website.
* Use color and contrast to make the registration button or link stand out. If people can’t
find it, then you won’t get many sign-ups.
* Streamline the registration process by removing unnecessary and optional elements;
people can fill those out later. If the form looks long, people may be put off of filling it
in.

These are just three ways you can lead your design towards accomplishing the goal of increasing the number of sign-ups to your service. Your goals may vary, but the strategy is the same: shape and focus all the design elements towards meeting those goals.

The same strategy applies to your brand and audience: design the aesthetic that best suits it. If your website’s focus is entertainment, then create an “experience.” You are free to use a lot of color and imagery to shape that experience. On the other hand, if you’re designing a website that is focused on information consumption, for example, a blog or a magazine, then focus on usability and readability. Create an interface that fades away and doesn’t distract the user from accessing the content.

5. MEASURE RESULTS
Once you’ve designed and deployed your website, it’s time to measure your success. This is just as important as the first two steps because until you test how well your design performs, you won’t know whether or not it is effective in fulfilling your goals.

If your goal is to increase the number of sign-ups to your service, measure it and see if your changes are making a positive impact. If you want to increase the number of subscribers to your blog, check your RSS stats. If you want to increase user involvement, see if you get more comments or more forum posts or whatever else is relevant in your context.

You can, of course, also ask people for their feedback, and this is a very good way to check if you’re on the right track. Be careful though not to implement every suggestion people make. Everyone has different tastes and wants, so everyone is going to have a different opinion about what your website should look like. If you do collect feedback, look for patterns; see if there are common issues that crop up and deal with those.

Measuring various website metrics is a whole science unto itself and is beyond the scope of this article. But however in-depth your analytics are at this stage doesn’t really matter; the important thing is that at the very least you have some way of measuring your key objectives. You can use this information to see if you’re moving in the right direction with your design and with any future changes you or your client make.

6. KAIZEN
There is a Japanese philosophy called “Kaizen,” which focuses on continuous improvement using small steps. When you work on your website, you should be thinking of Kaizen because the version you’ve just published is not the final version. There doesn’t even have to be a final version.

You can always make improvements, and the very nature of a website will allow you to introduce these at any time. This is because a website isn’t a magazine that you print and sell: once a magazine copy is out of your hands, you cannot make any changes or fix any spelling mistakes or errors. A website, however, sits on your server: if you find a mistake, you can fix it right away. In the same vein, you can introduce gradual improvements and updates to make your website more effective in serving its function.
Using the results of your measurements, you can identify problem areas. Perhaps your visitors cannot find the RSS feed link, or your bounce rate is too high or an important page on your website isn’t getting enough visits. Whatever the problem is, there will always be a way to improve things.

CONCLUSION
The main gist of strategic design is simply common sense: you’re making something for a specific purpose, so of course it should fulfill that purpose through its design. But it is actually very easy to lose track of your goals and end up with something that is beautiful but ultimately doesn’t work in its context. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of implementing the latest design trends just because they look attractive or shaping a section of your website to resemble another website that you really like without first thinking about why you are doing it or how it fits in with the purpose of your project.

Avoid falling into these traps by thinking through every design decision you make. Why is this button this color? Why are we using tabs? Why should we use icons here? Once you get into the habit of questioning your every design decision, the whole process will become much more focused. Think about the product or organization you’re representing. Think about the target audience and your brand. What will work in this context? What is expected? How can you use design to best fulfill the website’s purpose? Don’t just build a beautiful website: make a website that really works.

Source: Novo Graphix

There are many ways to use Web content to keep your customers happy, increase revenues, and improve the traffic your Web site gets each day. Use these techniques and you’ll see a difference in your business.

1. THE “ABOUT US” PAGE
Having an “About Us” page on your Web site can really increase your credibility with potential customers. If a prospect visits your Web site and can’t get a good idea of how you do business, they may choose to make their purchases somewhere else. Whether you sell products or provide professional services, having an “About Us” page helps you tell the world about your company and everything you have to offer.

2. PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS
If you sell products from your Web site, you’ll need excellent descriptions so your customers can get a good idea of what they will be purchasing. Which description sounds more helpful, “Red shirt, size large” or “100% cotton shirt in red, blue, white, black, and yellow. White piping available on the sleeves and collar with a front pocket for added convenience; available in sizes XS to XXXL.”? The more descriptive you are in your product descriptions, the better the chance that someone will buy from you.

3. SERVICE DESCRIPTIONS
Have you ever been to a service-based Web site and you just couldn’t figure out what the business owners DID for their customers? In specific niches, some industry jargon might be expected, but describing your services so that everyone can understand them makes better business sense. Instead of simply listing your services, use your service titles as headers and insert a description of each service underneath the appropriate heading. You can also make a list on your main services page and have links to a description of each individual service.

4. BECOMING A VISITOR RESOURCE
Some people are looking to buy products and services when they are surfing the Web, but many are often looking for more information about a topic before they commit to making any kind of purchase. Having a Web site that only promotes your products and services isn’t the best way to serve your customers. Add articles to your site that relate to your products and services but aren’t outright advertisements for your company. A good example of this type of article would be a piece on using pillows to decorate your living room used on a home furnishing Web site. The article is useful for visitors, but still ties in with the products and services being promoted on the rest of the Web site. You can have anywhere from 10 to 1,000 articles on your site to help your business become known as a trusted resource for information.

5. IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS
These days, users want information as fast as possible. If you place images on your Web site, they can take a long time to load and make your visitors look elsewhere for their information. But, if you use alt-image tags to describe your images, these tags will load faster so your visitors get what they’re looking for. You can write short descriptions of your images and use keywords if you want to optimize your Web site. So, alt-image tags really pack a punch when you use them on your Web site.

6. OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE
You may have heard the terms “search engine optimization” or “keyword-rich content” floating around while you were doing Web research. Optimizing your Web site is a way of helping visitors find you by improving your rankings in the search engines. You can use keyword-rich Web content to help visitors find your site so they can be exposed to the products and services you provide.

7. PRESS RELEASES
Press releases are a great form of content that can be used to generate publicity and traffic for your Web site and get your business the recognition it deserves. You can use your press releases on your site and by distributing them to online newswires so they can be picked up by those who are interested in your news. Make sure you make the releases interesting and consider your audience when distributing them. Just because you think your products and services are interesting doesn’t mean other people will. Tie your news in with local events or announce partnerships with other businesses or charities.

Generally, website owners are overly concentrated on getting the best graphical layout for their site at all costs, but few go further to work on SEO and usability and even fewer focus on creating website content. How can you create a content that will convert? Read on.

There are a couple of things to consider before writing your site content:

* your customers’ interests and needs - why do they buy your product/service?
* targeted keywords - which keywords drive the most sales/profit/sign-ups?
* the intent of the content: is it to inform your visitors or to sell?

Let’s see why those aspects are important.

FOCUS ON THE CUSTOMERS’ NEEDS
Obviously, to make your site content efficient you’ll need to provide value to your visitors. To provide value to your customers, you need to know their needs to tell them how your product or service can make their life better. This means that you’ll need to focus on the benefits of your product or service, not on the features. The more benefits you describe, the more you connect your content to the needs, interests and reasons people buy from you, the more efficient your website content will be.

Another moment here is to focus on your customers, not you. You need to write about the customers, their needs, thoughts and emotions, not your product or your company. No matter how well you may write, you need to focus on your customers in your content.

TARGET THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
Another aspect of talking the same language with your customers is the words you use. To know that, you’ll need to do some keyword research to understand how your customers think and how they relate to your product. When writing website content, you’ll be aware what keywords to use.

PICK THE RIGHT TONE
And yet another important factor to remember is the tone of your content. The content tone depends on how well you know your customers, how you want to position yourself and the purpose the content services: whether you need to prompt your customers to do something or you simply need to inform them of something.

Developing a fitting tone will make your content more compelling and more pleasant to read.

HOW TO WRITE?
Now that we know what to think about before writing the content, let’s actually see how to do it.

First of all, you need to focus on the benefits of your product or service that make your customer buy from you. To do this, you’ll need to empathize with your clients and think like them. Write how they can improve their lives with your help.

Secondly, you need to write naturally, just as you would talk to your friend who suddenly started considering your product or service. Then, after the copy (content) is written, you may add relevant keywords in it by replacing pronouns, such as ‘it, he, she’ with a more descriptive word as well as using synonyms. The point here is to still sound naturally (with readable content) and use keywords as well.

Of course, you’d rather stick to two or three (at most) synonyms throughout the piece, because you need to target the least possible amount of keyword phrases in it (that’s another SEO story, though).

Thirdly, the tone of your content can make a huge difference. If your aim is to inform your site visitors, you may as well pick a less formal tone, add sparks of humour here and there, etc. If your site presents formal information, you may as well be more reserved.

Usually, an informative tone, with a bit of personality and humour may be best for most sites, as it represents the tone people are familiar with in the real life and they can relate to the content author more closely.

In essence, the most important thing you can think of when writing your content is the value you provide to your site visitors. Your content is the highway that you can do that so it is in your best interest so create the most pleasant experience for your site visitors with.

Source: Improve the Web

Red Cow Marketing & Technologies is pleased to announce the launch of the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce’s new Fredericton Physician Recruitment Initiative website; Go Fredericton. The website utilizes our myBusinessAdmin software which enables the Chamber to update and edit the website at their own leisure without added costs.

About Go Fredericton
In August of 2008 the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce launched its Fredericton Physician Recruitment Initiative, a community-based project intended to complement the existing efforts of the Regional Health Authority and the Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital.

The decision to form the initiative arose from discussions with Chamber members, who expressed concern over the ability to recruit skilled workers to a community experiencing a physician shortage, who pointed out that access to health care is a key requirement for companies looking to the city as a place to do business, and who noted that immigrants are unlikely to choose to relocate to, or remain in, a community that cannot offer them access to primary health care. These discussions made it apparent that the physician shortage had the potential to affect more than just a small group of people — it could create a serious human resources challenge, hinder economic development efforts, and prevent the province from achieving its population growth targets.

Website
http://www.gofredericton.ca

Red Cow Marketing & Technologies is pleased to announce the addition of Andrew Carr to our team as our new Fredericton based Product Specialist. Andrew has been in the sales game for years; spending 9 years at Cox Electronics & Communications in Fredericton and more recently at Future Shop. He’s bringing years of experience with customers to the plate and combined with his fantastic personality, he’ll be a great addition to our team.

Want to get in touch with Andrew? Here’s how…

Phone: 506 461 0712
E-Mail: andrew@redcow.ca