It’s only a few days until 2009 and your website isn’t working nearly as hard as you are. What’s up with that? Isn’t your website supposed to be your number one salesperson? He’s (“He” because he’s not pretty enough to be female) online 24/7, 365 days a year, no breaks, no vacation days, nothin’. So why do you feel like you’re doing 90% of the work in this relationship?

Maybe we should make some new years resolutions for your site to try and change the tide and ensure your website is more effective and profitable. Here’s a top 5 list to make things easy:

1. Blog
If you haven’t already heard it a thousand times, you will in 2009. A blog for your website is becoming a more and more vital element to a successful website. Blogs allow your visitors to:

• Get to know you
  Having a personable and approachable website allows your visitors to connect with you in a new way. This connection will increase their comfort level with you and the chances of them contacting you.

• Improve your search engine optimization (SEO)
  By consistently adding new content to your website, search engines will begin to crawl your site more often and soon begin to consider your site as a more valuable resource than before.

• Create a following
  When visitors to your site realize that you’re constantly adding valuable information that could help them personally or professionally, they will become fans of your blog and return more and more often.

2. Content
The content on your website will determine the overall value of your company to every visitor and search engine. This is a bit hard for a trained graphic designer to write, but the content is more important than the design. How long would you keep reading a book if the content was useless, even if the cover was beautiful? You buy a book for the value of the content, not the aesthetic appeal. Unless, I suppose, you’re an illiterate book collector.

3. Conversions
Every website is built for a purpose. Whether a personal blog or a 500-product e-commerce site, every site exists for conversions. The conversion for a blog may be the user reads a post and is informed. A conversion for most websites, however, is users either purchase a product or contact the company for more information. Here are a few ways you can increase conversions on your site:

• Forms
  Add a simple form on your site to be contacted, and not a mere email address.

• Landing Pages
  Create a few different landing pages for your top products or services. Build a few new pages on your site that focus exclusively on one important product. Add a simple form on that page as well as your phone number. If you have a live chat feature, add it. Make access to buy your product as simple as possible. Finally, find other sites online to link directly to those landing pages. Do not send visitors to your homepage if they’re likely seeking a specific product on a different page.

4. Design
For the first few years of my web design career, I didn’t think twice about eye tracking, heat mapping, content flow, conversion rates, bounce rates, accessibility, or most of the other web standards that are so critical to a successful website. I would simply design it so it looked as kick-asterisk as possible and assume that good design would compensate for the rest. The sites ended up anything but “kick-asterisk.” They were more like suck-hyphen. They had high bounce rates and low conversion rates.

So, is design nothing but fluff? Of course not. There is a reason why the affluent in our society all drive slick (but functional!) sports cars and live in very fancy homes with a high focus on aesthetics. We live in a world addicted to beauty and trends. This addiction leaves web surfers constantly seeking aesthetic websites that have a fresh look and feel and are current with the latest trends.

Check out our portfolio or these examples of aesthetic, yet functional sites.

5. SEO
Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are going to become some of your best friends in 2009 – assuming you desire success online next year.

With a dramatic increase of websites online every day, your market share is organically shrinking every day. You’re going to have to work harder and smarter to increase your traffic and conversions on your site.

If you need help with SEO and SEM, our specialist, Seth Jenks, is a great resource. SEO and SEM are the workers that will build the superhighways to your website. Without them, you’re nothing but a hot dog stand in the Gobi desert.

If there is any one thing that you can do this coming year to boost sales and exposure for yourself or your company, it will be your web presence. Remember that “you get what you pay for” in the business world. This applies especially to web design and development. Don’t skimp where it counts most.

Make a new years resolution now to give your site the TLC it deserves and it will give you love you need (not that kind of love, dude) in return.

Several years ago, when I was a sapling in the web design field, I was asked to build a website for an online video rental company. It was a painstaking process figuring out how to position tables (yes, tables) and cascading style sheets to get the page to look like my design.  I posted the site and they requested t first round of updates to the site. Every time I started tweaking one area of the page, another area would break, at which point my heart would usually stop and scenes of my client smashing through the door with a shotgun would flash through my mind. I would spend up to a week in utter panic fixing something that, these days I can update in a few minutes.

Have my skills really improved exponentially over the past few years? I’d like to think so. But that’s not what allows me to build and update a website in a fraction of the time it took a few years ago. It’s the use of a solid content management system.

A content management system (or CMS) is an infrastructure that allows users to build a website with far less programming knowledge than ever before. There is only one CMS I know of that allows you to update your site with absolutely zero knowledge of HTML or programming. It’s called Obray. There are countless CMSs available today. Many are open source. The most popular are Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, and others. There are also e-commerce specific CMSs that are built for online sales, such as OSCommerce, ZenCart, Magento, and Opencart.

The tolerance for non-programmers varies greatly among these systems. Wordpress is likely the easiest to install and use for a person who has little to no coding knowledge. If you want a website that is custom designed, you will always be wise to hire an agency or web designer/developer to build the foundation of your site. They will then hand you the steering wheel – the content management system – and let you drive your own site on the information superhighway.

To give a simple analogy, think of a CMS as a pre-fabricated house. The foundation is laid, the framing, sheetrock, plumbing, electrical, and such are all done for you. All you need to do is choose your wallpaper, paint, and decor. New wings (i.e. pages of the site) can be added with the click of a button. Just like updating your home, most content management tools will require learning a few simple skills, such as basic HTML.

As I mentioned earlier, however, if you have no desire or time to learn these skills, the Obray website management system is the winner. Obray is the beyond the cutting edge of CMS. It lets you drag and drop text, image areas and even video from a dock in your browser. Go watch the demo and see why it’s so different from the other systems I’ve mentioned.

If you ever have questions about which is best suited for your company, just shoot me an email.

This is our first attempt at a Vlog for Advent Creative. We’re still working on our video branding — still not sure what’s most effective. Any suggestions would be great.

(Reposted here from original blog location on http://www.adventcreative.com/blog)

Based on the most comprehensive statistics in the U.S., the following is a breakdown of screen resolution, browser usage, and operating system usage in 2008:

Screen Resolution / 2008

48% - 1024×768
38% - Higher than 1024×768
8% - 800×600
6% - Unknown

Browsers

44.2% - Mozilla Firefox
26.6% - Internet Explorer 7
20.0% - Internet Explorer 6
3.1% - Google Chrome
2.7% - Apple Safari
2.3% - Opera

Operating Systems

72% - Windows XP
15% - Windows Vista
5.3% - Mac
3.8% - Linux
1.8% - Windows 2000

According to a recent study, the Flash player is present on 99% of all Internet browsers in the world.

This information is important to us because we are a web development group. We build websites for companies in every industry and across the globe. Every client we serve has a very specific audience in mind, but will inevitably receive visitors to their site who do not fit that demographic. Thus, every site we build must adhere to these basic web design principles to ensure every visitor has a pleasant, error-free experience on the website. If we fail to test our sites on all browsers, we’ll undoubtedly frustrate a percentage of visitors to the site, and as a result, damage the brand perception and market share of our client.

Keep in mind that there are over 50 other browsers online. Fifty! So – is it worth the investment to optimize your site for all of these broswers and versions? Absolutely not. 99% of users will get an accurate view of your site if you stick with the top 5 listed above.

Let us know if you’re having trouble with your website – we may have some pointers to help you decrease your bounce rate.

ALEX is our latest project, that I honestly can say, kicks arse. It’s an online video training application to allow corporations and training groups to develop an online video training website instead of flying to multiple locations and training in person. It even allows you to set up tests after each video to ensure the user’s retention is adequate.

Check out the site and watch the intro videos:  http://www.alexlearning.com

We (Advent Creative) were asked several months ago to redesign one of Sports Illustrated’s websites, www.sicovers.com.

It’s good to see the developers finally got their side completed and the site up and live before the holidays.

It was a fun process to analyze this niche audience and figure out what type of e-commerce site would be most effective. The target consumers were far less tech savvy than anticipated - so we really had to simplify every step of the shopping and buying process. We’ll have to see how sales and traffic change due to this update. It would be ideal to do an eye tracking and heat mapping study to really optimize the shopping experience….maybe phase 2.

When you make a living designing websites, it’s difficult to build something new and different. In fact, it’s difficult to build anything at all when things are as busy as they are. So, just having anything up is great for now. I’ll design something exciting and fresh one of these days.  “Baby steps, Bob”.

I’m hardly the blogging type. I have no desire to plaster my life and experiences on a public site for the world to see. But I think I’m ok to share my work and maybe a few thoughts that may be able to help others gain inspiration or learn something new.

And so - here we are. I’ll try and keep things up to date…but don’t hold your breath.