User Experience (UX) | kenn bivins

https://kennbivins.com creative thinker and do-er Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:01:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 5 Must-have Steps When Designing a Website for Conversions https://kennbivins.com/5-must-have-steps-when-designing-a-website/ https://kennbivins.com/5-must-have-steps-when-designing-a-website/#respond Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:01:52 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=306 We help marketers understand the process of website design better, so they can steer their website redesign projects through the right stages. This way they can ensure their website is better able to engage visitors and achieve the desired business goals. One of those key stages are Design and Development. Here is where your idea...

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We help marketers understand the process of website design better, so they can steer their website redesign projects through the right stages. This way they can ensure their website is better able to engage visitors and achieve the desired business goals.

One of those key stages are Design and Development. Here is where your idea materializes. In this article we’ll dive deeper and explain what are some of the best practices for creating effective and engaging online experience for your prospects.

Step 1: Set the Scene with Information Architecture

The activities related to Information Architecture (IA) help you create the structure of the website, so you can understand what information you need to make available depending on where the user is on your website.

Here are some of the most common Information Architecture deliverables:

Content Inventory and Organization: A detailed and organized list of all the current content on the website, and future content to be introduced with the redesign. Planning and creating your content early in the process enables the design and development teams to create the best possible product.
Site Map: A visual that documents all pages and page types on the website, together with the paths that users must take to reach a certain page. This provides a bird’s eye view of all the pages in the website, and the hierarchy between pages.
User Flows and Scenarios: A visual that shows the steps and actions a user must take in order to achieve a certain goal on the website. These types of deliverables are really useful when dealing with more complex functionalities on your website.

The easier it is for your users to find what they are looking for on your website, the better your IA is. The IA should be perfectly aligned with the mission and purpose of the website, but you also need to consider the goals of the end users. The organization of the content should enable your users to accomplish their goals, and meet their expectations as defined in your user personas earlier.

Step 2: Tell a Story with Wireframes

After you have all the content ready and structured in the right way, it’s time to think about how to arrange all of the information on the pages of the website. The wireframes are the blueprint for the upcoming visual design. The purpose of the wireframes is to bring together the main elements of the website: the content, the navigation, and all the interaction elements such as buttons and forms on each page. The wireframes should not incorporate any visual designs, graphic or branding elements.

Using only text and simple shapes (without any color or style), you can collaborate on the initial layout of each page of the website.

Wireframes are the best way to convey how the information on each page is structured and organized. Also, wireframes are an easy and quick method for you to align all decision makers around the structure of your website and the connections between each page.

Step 3: Explore the visual design with Mockups

Using your wireframes as a foundation, web designers create the full graphic composition (also referred to as “mockups”) for all the pages in the website. The idea of the mockup is to include all visual styles and elements, so that you can agree on how the final website will look and feel.

The mockups show the layout of each page, the typography (fonts), the images and graphics for all elements on each page exactly as they should look on the final working website. Note that similar to wireframes, mockups are static and are not meant to demonstrate any functionality.

Using mockups, the final look and feel is laid out for each page. They include the final fonts, images, colors and visual styles of all elements as they should appear on the actual website.

Step 4: Test the User Experience with Prototypes

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the final website by looking only at documentation, or even mockups of the final designs. Prototypes are the closest thing you can get to a working website, before actually doing any coding and development.

Unlike the static wireframes and mockups, a prototype is a functional deliverable. This means that a user can interact with a prototype by clicking on the links, buttons and other elements that trigger behaviour on your website.

With interactive (clickable) prototypes, you can easily test the website internally with your team, or even with some of your potential users or customers.

A big benefit of creating prototypes is that you can conduct user tests early in the redesign process. This helps identify flaws and make quick and easy improvements, before any actual development commences.

Step 5: Get Development on Board

An important aspect of development to understand is that there are always multiple solutions for a single problem. Depending on your individual project and the developers you are working with, the approach and solutions will vary. But you can make sure the outcome is what you are looking for, by setting aside sufficient time to explain the business goals and requirements of the project to everyone in the development team, not just the project manager.

If possible, schedule regular meetings with the development team (in person or online) to discuss project details and overall progress.

The more context everyone involved has about the solution they are building, the better the result. For the time of the project, try to include the developers as part of your team. Schedule regular updates (once or twice a week), where you discuss the progress, issues and next steps.

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/5-must-have-steps-when-designing-a-website/feed/ 0 Tips for Promoting Your Business and Creating Your Brand https://kennbivins.com/promoting-your-business-and-creating-your-brand/ https://kennbivins.com/promoting-your-business-and-creating-your-brand/#respond Wed, 04 Sep 2013 12:43:56 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=1499 Adams also came to understand how important it was that his carefully crafted photos were reproduced to best effect. At Bender’s invitation, he joined the prestigious Roxburghe Club, an association devoted to fine printing and high standards in book arts.

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You may have worked hard to find the right design and platform for developing an eCommerce website and are ready to get out there and start selling your products. But without promotion and building up a brand, you could be missing out on a lot of revenue for your business.

Branding

Branding is an important part of building up your business. It creates recognition for your business, gives your advertising more of a foundation and can be a trustworthy quality for customers. That level of trust can lead to more referrals, generating new customers, and build a confidence within the business for employees.

A big part of SEO is promotion and building brand awareness. You may be wondering what you can do to make undertaking such an important task easier and more effective.

Here are some tips for establishing brand awareness and promoting your eCommerce website:

Paid Search

An effective way to start promoting your business quickly is to use paid search. By using paid search, you can move higher on results pages in a shorter amount of time. It can also build brand awareness that can help your organic results and lead to purchases through organic searches.

Reviews

Reviews are very important for building a brand. There are many ways you can use reviews. First, you want to make sure that your website allows visitors to leave reviews. Contact popular bloggers or paying customers and ask them for reviews on your products. Get your business listed on Yelp and other similar review sites. You can even write blog posts reviewing your products, as long as you do so in an unbiased way.

Content and Links

In online marketing, content is king. You have to produce content regularly to keep improving your SEO and reach on search engines. Once you have produced content, make sure to share it often to build links. Links and content are the most important factors to building your organic ranking on Google and other search engines. With our eCommerce SEO services, we make sure your link structure is built for strong SEO results and focus content on the keywords you want to see better in search results and more shares to create backlinking.

Stay Consistent in Branding

As you start to establish a brand — a logo, a design, a voice for your content — make sure to stay consistent in your branding. The most popular brands in the world are recognizable instantly and it may be because of a logo, a slogan, a jingle, anything that makes it unique and separates it from the competition. In building your brand, identify your vision for your brand, define a target audience and start promoting your brand and growing through outreach.

At VamTam, we have worked with a number of clients on branding at different levels. Messages in Metal rebuilt their brand with a new logo and we created a custom design to match it to better fit his brand.

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/promoting-your-business-and-creating-your-brand/feed/ 0 Essential Pieces to Creating Optimized Website Pages https://kennbivins.com/essential-optimized-website-pages/ https://kennbivins.com/essential-optimized-website-pages/#respond Wed, 28 Aug 2013 21:23:54 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=1525 Adams also came to understand how important it was that his carefully crafted photos were reproduced to best effect.

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Content optimization is one of the key elements of SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is often very complex and difficult to understand. However, the steps and pieces to creating an optimized website page is one of the easier elements to understand, especially if you are only getting started with the basics of SEO.

First and foremost, let me explain to you how SEO works. If you go to Google search results, for example, and type “women’s tops,” the first thing that pops up are web pages that utilize Adwords over SEO. While Adwords has the ability to bring you to the top of search engine result pages overnight, SEO takes time to build. The differentiating factor, however, is that Adwords shows users that the website or link being advertised is, in fact, a paid “ad” with an “ad” symbol. SEO, on the other hand, produces organic search results, meaning that it boosts your rankings organically through link building, offering consumers a trust factor in deciding to choose your site over a paid, advertised one.

Now, in order to have a well-optimized page, you need to have good content. It’s not as simple as writing a blog post and publishing that earns rankings on search engines. There needs to be reasoning behind your content, like educating your audience on a topic, to drive more social engagement or generate leads.

So how can you make your website content optimized perfectly? Here are a few essential elements.

Select a Target Keyword

Every piece of content created should begin with a specific target keyword. This keyword will serve as the foundation for your content, the main topic being discussed, and should be seen in many places within your content. However, while you want to use this keyword a certain number of times within your content, you do not want to “overstuff” your content with the targeted keyword. Search engines will view this as “keyword stuffing,” which will negatively affect your campaign. Having a targeted keyword will also allow you to build additional keywords around it to support the content and influence other parts of your page.

Create a Search-Engine Friendly URL

What is an SEO friendly URL? When creating a blog post and saving it as a draft, you may notice that the URL created for the new post defaults to something like this - http://www.vamtam.com/?p=123. To effectively rank in search engines like Google, a URL that contains three to five words, including the focus keyword, can make a huge difference. Consider the default URL above with this one, which is search engine friendly — https://www.vamtam.com/essential-optimized-website-pages.

Include a Title Tag

A title tag is as it sounds. It’s the title of the page, but not on the webpage itself. In your browser, when you visit a website, you don’t see the URL in the open tabs of your browser, you see a title tag. The title tag uses the focus keyword first and builds out the rest of the title with additional elements of the content. For example, a business owner in Philadelphia may have a title tag with a focus keyword describing his business, but also include his location and top product or service to enhance the title tag.

Include a Meta Description

There was a time when meta descriptions were part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Even though this is no longer the case, a meta description on your content is still very important for your ranking. Think of a meta description like a social media post where you are describing what the page is about. You have a limited number of characters to promote your content with the targeted keyword and draw in consumers and improve your click-through rate.

Enhance with Images and Video

Building your content around a focus keyword is important, but there are other ways you can enhance your content that can help optimize your page. Content is easier to read when images and video are included. These elements increase dwell time, the amount of time a visitor spends on a page, and can increase engagement as well. To best utilize this, use high-quality, optimized images and embed videos from YouTube or another platform.

Internal Links

It’s always important to link to other related content within your own website. It helps both website visitors and search engines easily navigate through your content as a whole. If the topic you are writing about has its own page on your website, link back to that. Obviously linking to pages within your own website makes sense because it keeps visitors on your website.

Social Sharing

Social media sharing does not factor into search engine ranking at all, but it is a way to connect with your visitors and allow them to make more connections for you. If your content is good, visitors will want to share it. Include share buttons so that content can be easily shared.

Looking for help optimizing your site with keyword research or content marketing? Look no further than the experts at VamTam. We work with clients to build a successful SEO campaign with carefully selected keywords to help your eCommerce website succeed. Contact us today!

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/essential-optimized-website-pages/feed/ 0 https://kennbivins.com/quote-seth-godin/ https://kennbivins.com/quote-seth-godin/#respond Mon, 24 May 2010 12:15:57 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=1794 Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/quote-seth-godin/feed/ 0 Email Campaigns: A Conversation With Your Customers https://kennbivins.com/email-campaigns-a-conversation-with-your-customers/ https://kennbivins.com/email-campaigns-a-conversation-with-your-customers/#respond Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:55:06 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=299 Adams also came to understand how important it was that his carefully crafted photos were reproduced to best effect. At Bender’s invitation, he joined the prestigious Roxburghe Club, an association devoted to fine printing and high standards in book arts.

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7 Tips for A Victorious Email Marketing Campaign

It isn’t easy to connect with your audience; it’s a hefty feat that demands serious talent and experience. A frustrating aspect of running any business is that, even if you have impeccable products and service, you won’t get anywhere if customers don’t know who you are. While an SEO campaign and PPC can put you on the map, reeling in returning customers is another battle. Once someone makes a purchase, you should have a system set up that convinces them to move on to your other products and services.

An email campaign serves as an educational reminder to your customers and potential customers that your company is the best at what you do. You want your customers to feel that your products are an absolute necessity, and a friendly reminder is the best way to do so. However, without the correct methods, you could end up doing more harm than good. The last thing you want is to badger your customers and have them unsubscribe. That’s where Byra comes in! Below are seven different tactics to running a tried and true email campaign:

Flawless Design

Graphic designers are employed for a reason. Your design needs to cater to the reader; point them towards the important sections and make sure that your email is visually pleasing. Emails that are muddled by busy information are likely to be ignored, so you want your email sleek and simplistic. Think of how you’ve branded your own business and website: that’s exactly the flow that you want to keep for your emails. After all, they represent the voice of your company!

Set the Stage

Wildly sprinting into your campaign with no concept in mind is a huge mistake. Many obsess over the subject line, but what’s the point of a stylish subject line if it doesn’t match the content inside? What you want is a uniform thought distributed evenly throughout your email. If you plan on offering a promotion, make that apparent from the start and to the finish. Be honest, be concise, and have a real objective in mind. Don’t ever mislead your customers; they will unsubscribe.

Engaging Copy

A critical mistake that many businesses fall into is underestimating the importance of a copywriter. There is virtually no purpose to an email campaign if the content is written poorly; you might as well just slam your head on the keyboard and click “send.” Consumers are plagued by marketing emails day in and day out. If you want to grab their attention, your emails need to be authentic and well written. Convey your message with clever language that’s fun to read but remains relevant to your email’s purpose. Don’t know how? Hire a copywriter!

Applicable Subject Line

Don’t lie. Period. We cannot stress this enough; a subject line that does not express what is inside the actual email is an absolute deterrent. Nobody wants to feel duped, and you certainly don’t want to give your customers the impression that your business is insincere. Aside from honesty, you want to invoke curiosity from your readers. Create an enticing headline that truthfully displays what’s inside your email and match that headline with a seductive call-to-action within your content.

Responsive is Imperative

How many people do you know that check their email on their phone? Everyone? Exactly. Mobile is no longer a new phenomenon, it’s a marketing necessity. You cannot tap into your campaigns fullest potential if you don’t create responsive design for your emails. This isn’t a suggestion; this is a must.

Automated Responses

Technology is a beautiful thing, and you’d be foolish to ignore the technological prowess that surrounds today’s emails. With automated responses, you can be sure that your customers are taken care of 100% of the time, every time. Not at your computer? Well, how about a response that explains to a particular customer that you’ve received their email and plan on responding within the next 24 hours? It’s the little things that keep people interested, and this is just as much a customer service tactic as it is an email campaign tactic.

A/B Testing

Having trouble deciding between two concepts? Well, we applaud you for conceiving two stellar ideas, and we have a solution. Send out your two favorite concepts to smaller email groups, and test how each one does. When you see the results, go with the higher performing email. This can save you.

Bonus Tip: Hire Byra to Run Your Email Campaign

Byra has the privilege of working with the best designers, developers, and copywriters around, and our team has brought huge success to a plethora of businesses. Our email campaigns are run through the finest programs and we’ll take the time to customize your campaign to fit your needs. If you think that your business and sales could benefit from a dialogue with your customers, then contact Byra today.

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