1. Work out your site visitors’ immediate needs. Design and Plan your website for your user and than you.

Your website has to provide information that fulfils the immediate needs of your site visitors. This is the fundamental principle behind usable website design, so let’s repeat it one more time: Your website has to provide information that fulfils the immediate needs of your site visitors.

OK, now we’ve got that straight, we come up against a problem: Your goals for the website are probably different to the immediate needs of your site visitors. Oh dear.

Let’s illustrate this problem, and its solution, with the example of a software company’s website.
Their immediate goal is to get visitors to contact them and ultimately commission them to do some web development work. Their site visitors are probably interested in getting web development work done (if not, why are they on this website?), but it’s unlikely that this is their immediate need when they arrive at the website.

The immediate needs of the site visitors’ are probably to answer questions like:
• Can I trust them?
• Are they any good at what they do?
• Will they get the job done?
Before the website begins to sell to its site visitors, it has to answer their questions and put their fears to rest. This is fundamentally important, so one more time: Before the website begins to sell to its site visitors, it has to answer their questions and put their fears to rest.



In the case of this software company, they could provide a recommend wizard, compare products, client testimonials etc. Can you think of any other information they should offer?


2. Create an information flow
Now we’ve worked out what our site visitors’ immediate needs are, we need to create an information flow, a path (or paths) that your site visitors will traverse whilst on your website. The path(s) will initially address their concerns and needs and will gradually take them towards completing your goal for them.

To create this plan we’ll need to:
• Identify the different groups of people who’ll use your website
• Work out what you want each of these groups to achieve on your website
• Identify the information you’ll need to provide for them to achieve this (and in what order)
• Work out what might put them off achieving this
• Identify the information you’ll need to provide to prevent them being put off

From this, you’ll be able to create a list of website pages and a rough idea of how they might flow together. You’ll then be able to work out exactly what pages to include on the website and how to group these pages together.

Bear in mind though, some users will need more information than others, so you’ll always need to provide them with a choice of continuing on the information flow or jumping off so that they can achieve the goal you’ve set for them.

Going back to the website of the web design company, an information flow that their site visitors might go on could look something like this:
• Home Page
• Product Detail Page
• Individual Product Detail Page
• Product Demo Page
• Product Agreement Page
• Free Trial
• Case Studies
• Contact Us
The software company’s ultimate goal is for site visitors, choose and compare products that they offer to contact them and request their services. Wherever users are in this flow, they must be able to easily and immediately jump straight to the contact page at any point.

You’ve probably already seen this in action on websites. You arrive at the homepage and there are two or three prominent links (often in the form of boxes) telling you some basic information and requesting that you click on them to take you into some other part of the website. You go to that page on the website, read the information and then choose where to go next. And this keeps going on, until you either quit or complete the desired goal of the website.

So, software company’s homepage might look something like this in terms of pages and flow:

Another important point is how regular are updations on information for the website, based on that a developer and technical team can plan effective interface, currently most businesses and companies are working on wordpress platform and personally I also like wordpress as it can be customized for user needs and requirements.


3. Usability testing
Once the website plan has been created, it’s time to test it. This is the most important usability test that needs to be done and the one that will save you the most time and money in the long run. According to IBM, every $1 invested in making your website easy-to-use returns $10 to $100.

If you don’t do any usability testing you may discover that the structure of the website doesn’t make sense once the website’s up and running. This can and has happened and it leaves you with two choices: redesign the website or make a new website – neither are attractive options.

The most common objections to doing usability testing are:• It’s too expensive!
• It’ll take too much time!
• I don’t know how to do it!

Wrong, wrong, and wrong! Usability testing, especially at this early stage, is incredibly cheap, quick, informal and easy to do. You just need to show five people the plan/site map of the website and ask them:
• What’s the point of this website?
• If you were on this homepage, where you would click? And where after that?
• Is it what you need?

That’s it! As long as these five people roughly fit into your user profile everything should be fine. It’s been shown that using five people for a usability test will uncover 85% of the usability issues of the website.

So let’s do an excercise now, Let’s pull pen and paper and just answer these 3 things – What, Why and When? Let’s discuss these 3 things for your website, if your current website answer all of these than you are the winner:)

Let’s meet again after 3 hours and discuss it in detail Till than enjoy the coffee, tea.:) with my fav song and singer Josh Gorban – Your Rasie Me Up – Your website should raise you like this, let it work for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJxrX42WcjQ

Regurlar price $750 and for limited time only half off $ 375. Happy Thanksgiving!
Let’s connect at info@57pixelmedia.com

Below are some of the thumbnails shots from our web protfolio for your review. We are so thankful to our existing clients for giving us the opportunity and look forward to interact with our new clients. Incase for further questions please feel free to send us email at info@57pixelmedia.com

More Portfolio – Website
See our post on – Top 6 must ask questions to your website designer and developer

1. First Step – Login to account and go to > Account Settings

2. Second Step – Click on download button and choose the archive

3. Third Step – Facebook will send you email once your data is downloaded and than you login again into your account >Go to Account Setting >Click on Download data >Below screen will appear and enter password (that will be our facebook password)

4. Fourth Step – You can now download your archive

5. Final View – I choose to download html data and below is the screenshot of how it will look.

Click-thru Rates – how much your banner complelled or made them excited to explore your facebook page or information.

The following guidelines should help you to make decisions whether you will be designing a banner ad yourself or you be will outsourcing your design to a professional graphic designer. You want to make sure that you effectively use every tool that you can in order to impact your click-thru rate and customer response.

1. Define the Purpose of Your Banner Ad

Are you designing this ad so that you can get more traffic to your website? Do you want to get more leads? Who are the audience? Do you want to promote the product or service or introducing you and your company.

2. Know Your Message
While banner ad design is important and graphic elements do matter, the message you are conveying is even more important. A good copy wins over graphic design 99% of the time! Of course, it’s like pulling teeth to get a graphic designer to admit such a thing could be true but I have worked with enough professional marketers to know, that even if the design is stellar…the copy better be even more so!

3. Keep Your Message Brief and to the Point

Keep the message short and make sure you provide a strong call-to-action. Follow the rule of emphasizing one benefit and one call-to-action per banner ad. Include too many call- to-actions and very likely, you will confuse your prospective lead and your click-thru rate will suffer.

4. Choose the Right Color or Colors

Choose colors for your banner ad that get attention and will contrast to the background color of your website or landing page. But don’t go overboard, and throw a kaleidoscope of color in your ad. A few colors that can be associated with your brand or a few colors that will emphasize the type of ad you are creating will do the job. Several studies have shown that people respond to certain colors over others and the right color increases effectiveness.

5. Keep the Design Simple
Save the fancy and intricate designs for your website or print media advertising. Less is more. Too much heavy graphics will make the file size heavy and when facebook reduce the size it will distort the image.

7. Use Legible Text
Good design with legible text and great message will make user to read the content and initiate interaction with you. It’s a good silence breaker.

Do let us know what you think about this post and was this information helpful? Above are some of the Facebook banner designs that we created and if you want similar powerful, effective banner to be created for your company or business please send us email at
info@57pixelmedia.comand we will respond back with solution immediately.

My facebook account was attacked by virus, so i implemented one simple additional step to secure my facebook account and attached is the presentation for the same. In case of any further questions send me email at info@57pixelmedia.com.

Simple few steps presentation and don’t wait to secure your page. One thing i would like to address here is some of the pages are still running on http:// and so is third party applications, so when you will click on those pages you might be given a message to continue on secure browsing or change it.

No doubt about it, we enjoyed every bite of it and owner could see we are pleased, we paid and moved to car to drive back, all my way I was thinking the “Upsell” magic that they approached and it worked well.

I have been hearing this across the board, even Social Media guru Social Media Examiner owner Michael Stelzner talked about it in one of the interviews, he was asked that if he charging nothing for sharing information than how he makes money? and his one of ideas was through email- Upsell through email. When people signup for monthly newsletter after seeing all the great info they share, people are open to review recommendations and other promotion stuff that SME recommend, because it come across as testimonial from them.

But here is the good thing in it, SME team still makes it point to give User complete freedom to choose, select and than apply action to it, which can be buying of product, downloading some e-book or reading new social media upcoming information forum etc.

So here are some interesting tips I gathered from them and applied in my business too, and iam happy to share it with you all.

UPSELL but not sound salesy

this is very crucial to maintain the sanity with your reader, they sign up for your newsletter or information, that doesn’t make them sign up for any promotional you have to offer.

For example, If you are florist than you can talk about great party ideas that one of your Professional vendor who is good at that and has showed exemplary results, or you can suggest your readers to check out them party on budget website by one of your friends or someone you have worked with.
You can add in a video link for view.

You have to remember again not to be pushy and shouldn’t sound self promoting idea. Let yur reader make the decision and choice.

Let your reader make the decision or choice

Now that you have given them some ideas, give them complete freedom to make choices, but be smart to promote related topics of their choice, which they really want to read and enjoy.

Let your reader make a choice to visit website or get in touch with budget party planners. One of the biggest mistakes people make in cross-selling or upselling is assuming that the customer won’t want it or can’t afford it. This is simply based on fear. Let your customers make that decision and you will be amazed at the results.

Build relationship with your clients or readers

Relationship building core to business success but challenge is how you do it virtually through emails or newsletter sign up or someone who is new client.

Follow-up with client and personalize your email and newsletter, it will be great touch and help you build relationship, never categories your prospects or clients in same category, every one of them have different requirements. Out of your 12,000 readers just 4,000 want some information that is not of relevance with other remaining 8,000 readers just send them small writeup in email stating that you have this new write up, product or services and wanted to share with them, again the idea is having your readers, clients make the decision to open it up and read it or give them option to share it with friends.

Thank you page on your website should be great way to building relationships. If you are new to the business and want some feedback on your website functionality or navigation or even information, request your prospect to fill short form up for you, it will help you understand prospect point of view. Even if you are seasoned business than ask them for referrals if any, simple question like, would you recommend us to your professional arena, Yes or no? Or recommend relevant e-book or package you can offer.

This will bring me to my next topic.

Let your network build network

Sharing is caring, you have created a product for your readers, than help them send or share it to their friends or network, it will be great testimony for your product. Just think for a moment, an idea about services, products or services suggested by your friends has more weightage than what you read online about it.

In hotel industry most of times we are given a card to fill about the services they have to offer, similarly in your email talk about the client that gave you work and recommended another client to you, Just don’t send them email to write back to you, list the points and let them rate it for you.

Good idea would be to have website testimonial form and send your client a link to fill it up for you, in same form add recommend it to friends. This way you are not bothering them with emails, and not asking them to forward or compose another email to send it to their friends.

Again add testimonial Video or link to it.

Maximize use of Email Signature

We all use email signature but with very little information. Add your website, blog, social media links and great would be testimonials video link. It can work wonders for you, the more that video will circulate the better it is for your business.

Upsell doesn’t cost a fortune – its simple ideas with effective implementation which can turn your business into Effective Marketing tool. The key to it is, planning and strategizing it well, every business require customized ideas and implementation as they have different audience, but its very effective and duable, all you need is strategist who can understand your business.

Website is not just information or fill in form, it’s how your user will experience and react to it. Social Media Examiner and Food Giants that I mentioned above uses the same technique but customized it for their unique audience. Let your offline business connect with online presence.

We appreciate your time and would love to hear from you. Let’s get started – If you are interested in getting a FREE review or consultation on How to UPSELL, please send us email at info@57pixelmedia.com or you can even fill in the form on right.

So now that you have created foundation and build great product and service, now you have to integrate that same model with online, than what are the basic key things you look for? How you get started? Which service provider you hire? How you plan the process? and final and foremost, Do you think of the deliverables more than OUTCOME. so with all inqusitiveness i wrote all of it down and thought where it should be great to dicuss this than with my peers and fellows.

How your offline work model is integrated with online presence? Focus should be the OUTCOME. The Results you got from it.

Below are few questions based on that, but you are more than happy to add your inputs into it.

1. What is your offline business model?
2. How you replicated or integrtaed with online structure to maximize your business profits? or even the hurdles you faced while doing it?
3. What was the duration to build the online model?
4. How much time your online business took to show Results?

We really appreciate your time in answering these 4 questions and this is part of our learning process to grow and we thought what could be better than asking our peers and experts? So please leave your comments below, incase you have question, please have them listed.

We are currently working with a client who understand the website, but not in terms of its effectiveness and how they can leverage it, after our 1 hour discussion over phone and my list of inquestive questions, she sounded more relaxed and comfortable answering the questions. I received this email from her.

“Thank you so much for today. It is so helpful to me to have that kind of dialogue with you. Iam very optimistic now to be working with you on this project as i see you are wearing my hat while creating my website. You understood my clientele, my offline setup and how you can help me integrate it with online system, what tools can help me smooth the process rather making it overwhelming. I appreciate your patience and personality.”
We website designer are so trained in doing things in certain way and we can’t blame client having same perception about designer and developer.

So here we go with key questions you must ask before hiring firm, designer, developer, we are not talking about technical stuff.

1. What do you think my business is all about and how well we can serve and connect with our audience. Can you show us the blueprint of it.

Let them initaite the dialouge, this will be sudden shift in their focus to understand the business. You can pinpoint the areas they might have missed during the process, its very crucial for them to know in depth knowledge of it. They should understand what your vision, what you want to achieve from the project. How the end user or your audience will interact with you on your website.
If you already have that planned out with expert, than discuss that with your designer or developer. You have to remember that they are the ones who will bridge that dialouge effectively through design and development.

2. What our competitiors are working on and how can we branch out or stand out through our design.

Let them sink in what’s around them, how they need to step it up to match or rather branchout. Give them task to do some research and reviewing, say it for 2 days and they can come back to you with questions and queries. Researching competitors will help them undetstand your business postioning in the market and help them create effecitve product for your business.

3. Can you submit blueprint or wireframes for building stronger foundationtion for our project.

Always ask for the first draft of the site in terms of layout, elements so that you can save time and build the final product more effectively. Don’t just start with design or mockups, blueprint will help you understand it better and easy to make changes. It’s also great for review purpose.
When we work on e-commerce site or any portal we have to have those blueprints to review and study. So that both the parties are on the samepage. Even when you are not working on huge project, its great to have blueprints of your foundation, so that you can anytime review and construct stronger building on it.

4. What is the project process?

Every project has a process to follow, first discussion, than timeline, submission and review, updations, programming, testing/Qulaity check, deployment? It is not important it has to be same way for all the projects, but definately there should be process, so that you can review work in phases and nip in the bud if there are any updations or you feel it is not going the way it was discussed and thats when blueprint will come in handy.

5. What are the quality assurance you are following?

Creating checklist for projects, before project is live, those fundamental checklist like cross browser compatibility, content reviewed, tags, page title etc. Review your site as you are the audience, it will help you understand and navigate your website. You don’t have to get int technical code to check it, simple browsing will help you achieve it.

6. Documentation and Training?

They must submit document on what were projects requirement, if they have used any kind of CMS (content management system) what is the process to update,add, delete or fomat content, images. Even if you have Blog done in wordpress they should provide you document explaining step by step on How to post post articles? Add/ update pages or graphics. How to create new post of Page for Marketing purpose. What all forms they are using, where you could find databse of it etc.

Here is a great info by Marketign Sherpa about The ability of a commercial Web site to provide its users with the flow experience has a number of positive marketing benefits. As well as enhancing the enjoyment of a site and the amount of time a consumer spends there, flow can lead to increased consumer learning, exploratory behaviour and the likelihood of repeat visits to a site.

Saving Time is Saving Money!! Best tip is now – asking these things shouldn’t cost you fortune!! believe it!:-)
We would love to hear from you, suggestions, challenges that you faced and how you overcome them while building your online project. If you need our consultancy on any of your ongoing projects or new projects you can write to me directly at info@57pixelmedia.com or call at 818-491-3285

Will meet you next week – with new topic – till than – Build the foundation.
-Shelly

Graphical user interfaces (GUI) accept input via devices such as computer keyboard and mouse and provide articulated graphical output on the computer monitor. There are at least two different principles widely used in GUI design: Object-oriented user interfaces (OOUIs) and application oriented interfaces[verification needed].

Web-based user interfaces or web user interfaces (WUI) are a subclass of GUIs that accept input and provide output by generating web pages which are transmitted via the Internet and viewed by the user using a web browser program. Newer implementations utilize Java, AJAX, Adobe Flex, Microsoft .NET, or similar technologies to provide real-time control in a separate program, eliminating the need to refresh a traditional HTML based web browser. Administrative web interfaces for web-servers, servers and networked computers are often called control panels.

Touchscreens are displays that accept input by touch of fingers or a stylus. Used in a growing amount of mobile devices and many types of point of sale, industrial processes and machines, self-service machines etc.

Today we will talk about Web based interface

Innovative user interface design is essential to provide improved user interaction online. The user interface of a website helps define how a user uses the application, whether its user friendly, easy to navigate and provides the functionality it is supposed to represent. Non user-friendly interfaces will make users leave the website and not be willing to come back for a second attempt.

We focus on:

• Proper Context
• Innovative
• Semantic
• Accessible
• Scalability
• Aesthetic
• Unified/ Holistic
• Elegance
• Clear and defined (visual) hierarchy

User interface development is a step taken after the wire framing of a website project is complete. Wireframe/Work Flow The objective of wire framing is to hold off graphic design, user interface development , HTML coding and programming until the basic skeletal framework of the site is in order. Another purpose of this exercise is to clearly define the elements of each page, their importance, their placement and how they will interlink to other pages. During wire frame development groups of pages are themed, and the structure of information flow is designed. Each page is reviewed as a stand-alone landing page to gauge the intuitiveness of the page.

Good website designs should have relevant information, user-friendly functionalities and the ability to retain visitors, gain their trust and make them come back again. A good website design takes into account graphics, content, functionality, placement of elements and well-researched use of color. Simplicity in design allows a user to focus on the important aspects of the website, such as its message, usability, functionality and the end result of meeting the objective of the website owner in terms of conversion.

Your website is a direct reflection of your brand, business, image, quality and services. The message you send to your visitors through your website pages must guide their usage of the website, and have a clear focal point. Good website designs will improve your visitors perception of your company’s capabilities and professionalism. It’s quite easy to find a cheap web design company on the Internet but difficult to find one that will be able to create good, inexpensive wire frame design and a user interfaces that form the basics for creating a well structured website with good design, layout and elements. Correct and balanced usage of web estate, white space, colors and graphics will define the overall look and feel of your website and whether you are projecting your company image appropriately.

Our web page design studio firmly believes that simplicity in design is paramount. Excess usage of gizmos, flash elements and loud graphics takes away from the essence of a well-balanced visual impact. At 57PixelMedia we put a lot of emphasis on clean, simple design that is highly Search Engine compatible and loads quickly. We are a web page design studio that focuses strongly on affordable web design and hosting services. Eye movement patterns, calls to action, logical progression from screen to screen are some of the concepts we believe help us put together good website designs. Depending upon which stage your project is in, with reference to the larger picture of your project lifecycle, a send us a note on your objectives and expectations.

If you have any queries or suggestion please write to us at info@57pixelmedia.com. Leave your comment and we will be more than happy to assist you.