New Zealand – Truly a ‘Rock Star’ Economy?

Well, I suppose there are ‘Rock Stars’ and ‘Rock Stars’... so you can take your pick...

Elvis (The King)

Jack Black (The Joker)

Jon Bon Jovi (The ’80s)

Phil Rudd

One more (very good) reason to have a Responsive Website

All hail Googlebot!

A while back I wrote this post describing why your business should have a responsive website. In the article I included the standard reasons, i.e. your website is optimised to give the best impression on a wide range of devices, it's easier for visitors to use your website regardless of which device they are using,  you don't need to have a separate website for visitors using smartphones to access your site – if you want the full story I'd suggest you read the post. In any case there’s now another, very valid, reason to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.

The boys and girls at Google have decreed that, in addition to relevance of content, frequency of updates, keywords, age of website, amount of site traffic, and inbound and outbound link quality a new factor will be added – whether or not the site is mobile-friendly. If your site is not responsive, or does not respond well to queries from different media, it will not rate as well as a responsive site does. The result is that the Page 1 position that you have worked to maintain on Google could well be gone at one fell swoop, and the only way to regain it is to upgrade your website to responsive design.

It’s a sad fact that while responsive design has been around for a few years now the majority of business websites are designed for computer systems only and do not cater for alternative methods of viewing web content such as smartphones, tablets or smart TVs (yes, at the current time this is even true of this blog!). During this time the number of media queries from the new generation of web capable has grown exponentially so it was really only a matter of time before Google decided to take this step.

In short, if you have a business website and it is not responsive on different media devices, now is a very good time to talk to your web design team about a site upgrade.

Not sure how your site is seen by Google? Check and see if your site passes the Google ‘mobile friendly’ test here. If it fails and you want more information or would like assistance we invite you to contact the team at mhdesign.

Goddammit Illustrator!!

Good to know there are others out there that feel the same was as I do. Adobe Illustrator is just so 'early 1990s'!!

What is the most important page on your business website?

Thought that it was the homepage, or the 'contact us’ page? Sorry, but you’re completely wrong.

It’s not that these pages aren’t important because they are. They include key information about your company, your product or service and your brand and they allow visitors to make an enquiry. But the most important pages on your business website are your landing pages.

Landing pages (also called ‘lead pages’) are pages that are designed specifically to capture fresh leads. They are usually linked to an online campaign and include relevant keywords that make your product or service more likely to be found in online search results. Most importantly, they should guide the visitor towards a specific course of action (getting more information, downloading something or making an online purchase).

A website will often have different landing pages for particular promotions and campaigns. Often these will include different versions of the same landing page that provide statistics on which keywords and approaches rate better than others. This ‘A/B testing’ means that you can ‘tweak’ and refine your landing pages to optimise your search results. Furthermore, this can be done very quickly enabling business owners to improve landing pages that are doing well and modify or cull pages that are not performing as desired.

A landing page is not a typical website page. While it should include branding cues that link to a business, it will differ in these areas:

1. It will have clear, concise and strong headline that complements the online advertisement that featured in the search result.
2. It will have impeccable spelling and grammar. If this is the first contact a visitor has with your company it's important to create a good impression, particularly if you're asking them to buy something!
3. It will feature trust indicators, including references from reliable sources such as media. If you're wanting people that don't know you to hand over personal information or buy something you need to establish trust. Trust indicators can include testimonials or industry affiliations.
4. It won’t have navigation any other web pages. Instead it will have a clear call to action that guides viewers into your ‘sales funnel’.

Well-constructed landing pages guide visitors through a process and capture key information, resulting in increased enquiries and sales leads while growing your enquiry database.

To find out more about landing pages and how they can work for your business talk to us at mhdesign.

It only happens once a year...

Is YOUR Website ‘Responsive’?

I don't mean ‘interactive’. Nor am I talking about the reponse that visitors have when they see your website. What I’m asking is whether or not your website ‘responds’ to the environment that it is viewed in.

Just a few years ago there were far fewer options for viewing a website. The normal viewing environment was a computer, and the biggest worry for a web designer was whether to make the page width 800 or 1024 pixels wide. The only other option for viewing a site was a cellphone. Sure, some sites had a ‘mobile only’ version but this was normally a vastly stripped-back version of the ‘main’ website. And the reason for this was twofold. Firstly mobile phones of the time had very limited bandwidth and processor capabilities. And secondly, the inadequate browsers and miniscule screens available meant there was a legitimate excuse for delivering a bare-bones version of the full site. Mobile browsing was not a pleasant experience. Website visitors that were using a mobile phone were ‘on the move’, accessing information out of necessity, not for entertainment. In short they only wanted the essential facts, not superfluous ‘eye candy’.

The arrival of the smartphone changed all that. Larger screen sizes and improved capability proved that these phones had online capabilities closer to mobile computing than mere cellphone browsing. Throw in the arrival of different sized tablets (with portrait or landscape viewing options) and SmartTVs and suddenly there are far more ways to view websites than ever before. And this raises a problem. It wasn’t that websites that looked fine on computer monitors didn't work on other devices. It was that websites either appeared in miniature on smartphone screens, requiring excessive ‘zooming’, ‘pinching’ and ‘scrolling’ on the user’s part or appeared at less-than-optimum resolution on the large screens of SmartTVs.

Responsive design solves these problems. A ‘responsive’ website will re-configure itself to best suit the device that it is being seen on. This might mean that site content is rearranged so that the less important page elements in the sidebar appear at the bottom of the screen. The site navigation is minimised on the screen until it is needed. Images will be optimised so they download efficiently and appear at best quality on a wide range of screen sizes.

As far as site management is concerned, properly-conceived responsive design has a huge advantage over preparing different versions of a website for different media. As there is only one copy of the site to maintain, there is no need to worry about keeping different versions of the site ‘in synch’.

Finally, a responsive website is not an ‘app’. Apps are special tools or ‘applications’ designed to perform a particular function. It might be to play a game, or to access secure online banking services. A responsive website is a complete version of the website, containing all the content no matter what environment it is viewed on.

To find out about Responsive Design and what it can do for your business, talk to Mike and the team at mhdesign.co.nz

Pearls of Wisdom From the Not-so-very-distant Past

The other day I stumbled across this article from 1994. Originally published by an Auckland business (Hippo Marketing Limited) long before everybody discovered the Internet and the World Wide Web, the thoughts on the Creative Industries contained therein are as true now as ever. Kim (Hippo) Brady, thank you for these words of wisdom!

Do It Yourself!

Ahh, good old Kiwi ingenuity! That great Do-it-Yourself mentality for which we are renowned. lt’s a truly wonderful thing – or is it?

In today’s competitive economy, with the pressure on everyone to run an increasingly ‘tighter ship’, many organisations have dispensed with their advertising agency or in-house marketing professionals, seeing them as ‘unnecessary expenditure’. After all, newspapers will design an ad for free, radio stations will write a commercial as part of the overall schedule cost and someone in the office could run up a brochure on their PC with the aid of a photocopier and a bottle of twink. So why pay good money to an outside specialist?

The answer lies in that key word – “Specialist”.

Just as your company employs each worker in his or her most productive capacity, your promotional endeavours be approached with an eye for maximum return. Every aspect of a promotion including research, branding, packaging, quality control and final presentation is designed to showcase your saleable commodity to its fullest advantage and any marketing activity should work towards this.

It’s true that, while most media will offer to produce your ad for free, they’re also doing the same for many other companies in any given week, with the result being your ad will look and sound just like many others. You’d hardly instruct your sales team to tell potential customers your product or service is ‘average’, its price ‘about the same as usual’ and its benefits ‘negligible’. Yet poorly produced advertising and promotional literature can communicate all this at a single glance. Or worse, have no impact at all.

There’s a simple truth about advertising, marketing, promotions and PR. They’re time and labour intensive, and when not done right will reflect poorly on the image of your company and the integrity of products or services. The simplest advertising or marketing job entails numerous steps, each involving various individuals who are specialists in their field.

Fortunately, recent years have seen an increase in the number of these talented professionals working in small collectives or a freelance capacity. People like photographers, designers, copywriters, graphic artists and illustrators and related professionals.

If you were to tap into this pool of talent you’d find that you don’t need to spend big bucks to have a job done right. The money simply needs to be spent wisely, in the right areas, allowing you and your staff to get on with what you do best.