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Using our Pro Package, we have incorporated a full content management system to enable the team at DEMSA to amend the public records that DEMSA is obliged to display. This project was especially tough due to the nature of DEMSA. A large part of their role is to ensure that member companies obey very strict guidelines regarding the message that their website displayed. As such, we needed to keep this in mind and work closely with the team to make sure that they didn’t break any of those same rules that they stand up uphold.

Visit Debt Management Standards Association – DEMSA

This project was extra specially important to us as the cause is so worthwhile, Red Chair is a specialist counselling service for those with addiction problems. Bill and his team have dedicated themselves to helping others in a very personal and profound way. We with them every success in the future and hope that our part helps in some way.

View the design

Visit Red Chair Specialist Addiction Services

He successfully completed a two week trial during which time he completed a design project for Red Chair, an alcohol and drug addiction counselling service based in Manchester. This project will be added to our portfolio shortly.

Congratulations and welcome to him from all at Push Internet Marketing.

Most business websites have a similar end goal. – To convert their website visitors to new customers.

How companies have been achieving this over the past 10-15 years has on the whole been through text and images and that has worked fine to a point.

However what they have also been doing over the past 10-15 years is TESTING. Testing every single colour, font, positioning and media type to perfect the art of online selling.

Because when you’re running a business you have to know the numbers, the facts and figures so you know what area of the business are failing and which areas are succeeding.

This is exactly the same with websites you want to know if the content that resides on you website is converting visitors to customers. So you track the figures and you end up with a conversion rate.
The most zoomed out form of conversion is for example what percentage of visitors that land on your website end up buying something.
Let’s say for example for every 1000 users that hit your website, on average 5 people will purchase a product.

Now to increase that to 10 in every 1000 people you need to research why those 5 people bought what they bought. And there are literally hundreds of ways that you can test and track this information and big businesses plough millions of pounds into finding out why.

Now obviously the small businesses that we look to help with their online marketing, obviously won’t have this level of budget to throw at their online marketing campaigns. However they can and should follow their lead. Small companies can easily put into place the basic forms of tracking and can also quite easily pick up free information about what works and doesn’t work at a basic level as well as subscribing to market research updates for a relatively small amount of money.

Now one area that has already been proven to increase conversion rates is the use of video as part of your sales and marketing campaigns.
Obviously it’s not for every business but if it suits your business you need to be creating video as part of your marketing message. Video is not as expensive as you might think, and every day that passes it is becoming more and more accessible and available to even the smallest of businesses.

Now for the real clincher the facts and figures:

There have been studies ran that shows that web video can boost conversion rates of up to 3-4 times more than with plain old text.

So what are you going to do?

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

This equation calculates the Page Rank of a page. This is covered in detail in our training seminars, sufficed to say that the more pages you have which are correctly interlinked the higher your potential Page Rank. Also the more inbound links you have the higher your Page Rank. And the higher the Page Rank, the higher up the search results. Of course it is more complicated than this; however, it gives you a basic understanding.

So why is this something you might want to know? As a designer it is important to build a website with this equation in mind. How many pages, what structure, how to link them? These questions should influence every part of your design; they should be key concepts in designing the architecture of the site, specifically navigation.

Think just for a second about any day to day task such as
turning on the hot water tap or finding you the way out of a busy room. What happens?
What decisions does your brain take and how aware are you that you’re making
those decisions? A great example of this is actually in the bottom right
hand corner of this monitor as I’m writing this now:

Now I know that if my monitor was replaced tomorrow with a new model that I’d
never seen in my life before, it would not take me long to navigate the
monitor, spot this symbol, PUSH it and hey presto it would turn on!

The design symbol used makes this product intuitive to
use.

If I had purchased a new monitor from a company who’s design
team had either thought a little too far out of the box or simply just didn’t
think and had not place this symbol on the power button. I’d have probably
spent maybe 2-3 minutes working out how to turn on the monitor. Not an issue
really. But if I’d still not found it after 3 minutes I might start to get
slightly annoyed. Eventually I may even curse THE DAM MONITOR!

What would have
just happened is that I’d have had a negative experience with the usability of
this product.

Well get this your customers
takes just 6 seconds to get annoyed when viewing a website and if it’s not
intuitive that majority of them will leave!

Over the coming weeks I’m going to explain the methodology and reasoning behind
what decisions designers make before drawing a single line, painting a single colour or places their text on their canvas. I hope to show you just how important those actions are in the process of conveying the overall message.

I’ll be bringing you strong, fact based reasoning behind the rules that govern
these design decisions and where necessary advising you why; on some occasions
you shouldn’t always follow them!

If you have a website, do yourself a favour ask someone, (preferably a room
full of people, and definitely no family or friends!) who has never experienced your website
before to sit down at a pc and navigate through your site and then ask them to give you their honest
opinion about the experience.

Now ask yourself why they didn’t navigate it the way that you’d have expected
them to?

The reason is that our brains interpret what we see in
different ways.

That said there are ways to train the brain into not thinking at all.

Confused? I’ll explain in my next post…