Before launching a website, you must determine the qualifications a website needs in order to be successful. There are several elements that must be taken into consideration, such as; website design, content, technical logistics, marketing, and much more. The list goes on and on…

Having a well-thought out strategy is what will make all the difference with a website’s success. Without it, you’re unable to design a site that will accomplish everything a business wants to because those goals haven’t been outlined. At Web Designer Vip, our strategy department likes to take phased approaches when we build a strategy for any type of business before the launch of a website. We begin by asking questions throughout all phases of the project—before it begins, during, and after. The following is a basic “game plan” for the major components of your strategy, and the right questions to ask that will help you create the most effective strategic plan, and reach your finish line to achieve the goals of your site.

Pre Game

The discovery phase is one of the most important parts of any successful website strategy because it helps shape the fundamental aspects of your entire project. Proper research will provide you with a clear understanding of your client needs, your competitive landscape, and the unique assets your business has to offer. Without fully grasping those components, you won’t be able to identify the right business objectives or goals, and furthermore, the tactics you need to implement in order to achieve them. Three crucial strategy elements that should be considered during your initial research phase include the following:

1. Target Audience

• Who are they, what will resonate with them the most?
• How do they behave? Will it be best to market to them offline, online, or socially?

2. Industry landscape

• Who are my top competitors in my vertical, direct, looking and goliaths alike?
• What are the industry trends, what is driving them?

3. Differentiators

• What is my competition not doing well that I can highlight or capitalize upon?
• What can I offer to offset or detract from any weaknesses?

Game Time

Determining actionable tasks and goals related to your website should be based on what you ultimately want your users to do. What your audience is looking for and how you can fulfil their need should be the basis for how your website is designed. The user-experience is crucial to the success of your online business and should be tailored to meet the needs of your users. These four elements of a strategy should be examined as you’re creating your website:

4. Social Integration

• Do I want posts to link to landing pages or just get the word out?
• How much interaction or commenting do I want between the company and customers? Does it need to be monitored?

5. Content Offerings

• Am I a catalogue, resource center, thought leadership portal, mix?
• How do I avoid dead ends and supplement with related upsells?

6. Conversion & CTAs

• What do I want users to do, buy, share, download, comment, or post?
• How do I prompt them to do so? With links, buttons, pop ups, and at what stage of interest?

7. Online Environment

• What are my users looking to do? Browse, buy, learn, or reach out?
• What atmosphere are they expecting any offline sites or other materials?

Post Game

After the launch of a website, you’re not done yet. In order to stay relevant and continue enhancing your online business, certain elements need to be evaluated and several tactics should be implemented. It’s important to look at what’s working and what’s not working so that you can adapt your strategy to most effectively meet the needs of your audience, and ultimately foster the growth you’re looking for with your business. After your website has launched, consider the following three strategy elements essential to your business plan:

Photo Credit: Kickify
8. Maintenance

• What CMS (Content Management System) is in place or should be in place?
• What resources are in house, or do I outsource?

9. Follow up Marketing

• What customer service is required or should be offered?
• What can keep them coming back? Remarketing? Newsletters?

10. What Next?

• Now what are the competitors and target audience up to, how do I keep up?
• What else can I add to my website and overall marketing to stay relevant?

An Effective Strategy

The right strategy helps any business take their goals and objectives, outlines them, and creates actionable methods to accomplish goals. By looking at a strategy in several phases, and ensuring that the most important elements, as identified above, are included, you will find the online success you’re seeking to be attainable. Reaching your customers in the most effective way will help foster sales, and build out business growth. A strategic approach will be crucial to reaching your objectives.

When trying to design a great website it is very easy to focus on making something aesthetically pleasing while forgetting to make sure that the website also achieves your business’ online goals. This is why a well thought-out strategy is crucial to the success of any digital design project. Regardless of brand or industry, having a strategy in place so that you’re able to identify business objectives and determine what tactics you will need to accomplish them is necessary. The process of building out an efficient strategy can be complex, so it makes sense to break it down into three phases:

Phase 1: Discovery

The initial stage of developing a strategy is heavily focused on research, so that we have an informed understanding of client needs. By doing a deep dive to learn about the industry, the competitive landscape, and the business, we gather details necessary for a successful kickoff and have a targeted set of questions for the client’s edification. A mix of both qualitative and quantitative research such as examining current website metrics, engaging in competitive analysis, and having conversations with stakeholders will provide us with findings that will be relevant throughout the entire strategy process.

When it comes to qualitative research, we speak with key stake holders that the client has identified to grasp how the web design or web redesign will play a role in their job. Whether it’s the CEO, CMO, or various members of the marketing or sales teams, having a clear understanding of needs from the website is imperative, so we host stakeholder interviews. We’ll ask questions such as, “How does your offline sales process fit in with online efforts?” or “What are the key customer pain points your website should address?” Having an understanding of what employees think about the website and where it can be improved can also provide vital design insights that will help the website generate more sales for your business. Often, this will guide us to opportunities that enhance the site. For example, some businesses may have employees that are on the road and need to access a database that is hosted through the website—in that instance, a sales extranet may be a good fit and increase productivity for the business’ employees.

This portion of research also uncovers how the website can become an effective tool for everyone at the company to help address the current specific needs of their job. Similarly, we examine more closely the future intentions for the website, and try to understand why the client feels the need to change it. By making sure that we are appropriately aligned with the needs this project needs to fulfill, we can determine the best ways to create a site that addresses every pain point that the client currently has with the site and what might pose a headache in the future.Every website wants to achieve the conversion goals that have been outlined—even if they aren’t an ecommerce website; conversion could mean simply directing them to a physical location. During this phase of the process, we’ll work with our clients to figure out exactly what the conversion is. This enables us to identify the best way to put our clients’ customers through the buyer journey with as little room for error as possible. We’ll also examine writing and marketing needs to identify what is currently occurring online and offline, and where this aspect of their marketing strategy needs to go. Looking at exactly how items are currently sold provides us with insights that help us shape the way the website should be organized, and how the users will access it.

On the other end of the discovery phase is quantitative research. At this point, our goal is to gather high-level findings that are backed up by statistics. Often, we’ll be interested in research related to the target audience, so we want concrete data that is going to provide forward-looking insights on how to best reach them. To gather numbers related to the needs of our target audience, we’ll develop surveys through a platform such as Survey Monkey, and disseminate it across email or social platforms to get as much data as possible. By connecting our questions with the users we’re targeting, we get valuable data that a client may not have been aware of before. Conducting our own research with each new initiative gives us supporting quantitative data that leaves us with unbiased findings that can eventually be used as a basis for decision-making related to design elements, calls-to-action, navigation, and other items that users may want to see or avoid on the website.

Being thorough with our research is incredibly important—especially during this phase, so that we can identify exactly what it is that needs to be examined in the strategy.

Phase 2: Audit

The culmination of the discovery phase brings us to the first audit—the first real deliverable that we present to the client. It’s at this point that we take all of our insights from the “Discovery” phase and use them to put together a coherent and actionable audit plan based on a plethora of different analyses so we know which areas to pinpoint more analyses on. For example, if the client is a start-up, we will look closely at other similar business models and do a more thorough branding audit to make sure their pending presence in the digital space stands out and can compete with both the Davids and Goliaths of their marketplace.

Several online tools can be a huge help when it comes to finding relevant information and determining areas of improvement. With Google Analytics, you can hone in on existing site performance (if applicable) and see firsthand what’s working and what’s not. During this part of the audience analysis, where the core goal is to really study the behavior of the users, we’ll sometimes look for reoccurring areas of the website where users are dropping off, or certain keywords that aren’t performing. We look to find out the driving need for why users visit their website, identify any issues the client has with the current one, and come up with ways we can solve them. From there, we can generate ideas on how to best increase results and foster business growth from the project at hand. When conducting a competitive analysis, we do a thorough examination of what we can learn from client competition — both failures and successes – to get a stronger indication of what actions we should be taking. We compare our findings to industry averages to gauge what is appropriate or what is not. For example, if the bounce rate is high on the current website, or there are low conversions when visitors access the site through a certain channel. Taking these metrics and then looking at eMarketer, a digital marketing data aggregation service, helps us find industry benchmarks to see if what we’ve found on the client website is occurring for other companies within the industry as well.To highlight all of our findings from the audit, we’ll include key takeaways from each aspect discussed, so that we can present the client with various areas for conversion improvement, and how we can achieve “stickiness,” so users continue to visit a website over and over again, ideally leading to the outlined goal that clients want users to fulfill.

Phase 3: Strategy

Once the audit has been presented, it’s time to move on to the web strategy phase. At this point, we focus on taking the insights found in the audit and fleshing them into actionable recommendations that integrate into various creative and design elements.

During the strategy phase, we create a conversion funnel that will reflect the buyer journey and how the consumer will likely go through the decision-making process. At the top is the awareness phase, where a user is not sure of their problem or if they need a solution. In the middle of the funnel are users who know what they need and are actively researching who has the right solution for them. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel are users that know what they want and which company they want, and simply need to be presented with a clearly defined direct path to conversion. If content aimed towards one area of the funnel is placed incorrectly it may prove to be useless. For example, placing a “buy now” button in a location where the customer has likely spent only a few seconds on your site and is definitely not ready to make a purchase is not going to convert to a sale. Consumers should be guided into the buying process and offered content depending on what stage they are at, and then guided down the funnel to get them closer to converting.

Also during this phase, we work with other departments at our agency to enhance the recommendations we are making. Typically, strategists will collaborate with members of the information architecture team to collaborate on user flows and pathways, or calls-to-action that will support both usability and web conversions. At other times, bringing in a graphic designer to offer creative recommendations and show inspiration behind the branding concepts will help the visualization of the web design project, and bring it to life.

Effective Processes Drive Achievements

When developing a strategy, every action is always supported and backed up by specific business objectives that clients are looking to achieve. By conducting thorough research, analyzing the insights found, and applying them to recommended action items, we can align our clients for success.

There’s no question that producing a well strategized and maintained content stream is crucial for the success of any digital business. The benefits are numerous and include everything from an increase in visitor engagement onsite, improved search engine rankings through SEO, and if your content marketing initiatives are done correctly, the establishment of a “sticky” factor that keeps people coming back to your site.

The copywriting portion of content marketing is the fun part, but in order to truly get the most out the content you produce it’s vital that you begin thinking about how effective your content is analytically. A truly effective content marketer combines both the creative and analytical aspects of proper content marketing to produce engaging, hard-hitting copy that is backed by significant amounts of quantitative research to inform what is being discussed. The following are some of the most important elements of proper data driven content marketing to keep in mind to help give your content marketing program a substantial edge over your competition.

Before Posting:

Surf a Little
The key to ensuring that what you’re writing is engaging is making sure that you’re staying on top of trends in your industry, and being aware of what your audience finds valuable. A fairly simple way to do this is to monitor social media conversations on Twitter and Facebook to stay abreast of news and developments. Regularly check industry news outlets and the social profiles of industry influencers to see what “hot topics” are circulating amongst your audience. The content you create should offer some fresh perspective or an appropriate response/reaction to the particular topic.

Leverage Google Trends as a tool for your research efforts to see what terms and trends are significant in searches and just how many people are expressing interest in these terms. The tool also allows you to see a forecast for any given term and topic allowing you to gauge the projected amount of interest users will have in this subject as time progresses. Build this data into your planning phase so that you can identify which topics and subjects users are seeking to learn the most about, and ultimately allow it to help you define what your content should be related to and how effective it will be in providing value to readers.

The content you create should always be substantiated by correlating data so that you know your efforts aren’t going to be useless. To highlight the benefits of utilizing Google Trends, consider the idea of a relatively new subject within your space and perhaps there isn’t a lot of existing content on it. Take a look at Google Trends to see if this subject may gain traction within the next few months, allowing you and your organization to get an edge over competition, and be one of the first to provide insights on the topic of interest.Keyword Research
Once you have a relevant topic, you’ll want to do your site a favor by ensuring that the final product benefits your search engine rankings and is easily accessible to users. To do this, create content that contains keywords appropriate to the article topic as well as your business’ products or service offerings. A great tool for this is Google Keyword Planner.

The goal here is to find keywords that have a high monthly search volume mixed with low competition, which greatly improves the chances of your content appearing prominently on the search results page when a user searches for the particular set of terms or keywords that you’ve identified. These keywords cannot simply be plugged into your content in any way possible, but instead should be naturally occurring in a way that provides an excellent and relevant user experience while simultaneously giving you as much SEO value as possible.

After Posting

Hopefully you’re using a tool like Google Analytics on your website to help you monitor your site’s performance. If so, allow a week or so to pass after posting your content to allow data about how users are interacting with your content to aggregate. Once you do, dig through the following metrics to analyze the performance of your content and it’s effectiveness in reaching the goal of the content. Identify what types of content is repeatedly producing the best results, and what content could use some improvements, is one of the best ways you can enhance your SEO by using data to drive your content marketing initiatives.

Key Metrics:

• Page Views: While it shouldn’t be the only metric that informs whether or not your content marketing initiatives are successful, page views are a solid metric that can be extremely helpful when it comes to comparing different pieces of content. It will inform you about what your audience is interested in and also help you identify what pieces of content are the most important on your site for generating traffic.
• Page Bounce Rate: You’ll want this as low as possible, as it indicates the content was engaging enough to send people elsewhere through the site. Remember that if you’re posting content on a blog a bounce rate at or just slightly below 90% is perfectly normal.
• Time on Page: These metrics are tied to bounce rate, and reiterates a visitor’s engagement with the content. The longer the average time is that users are interacting with your content the more likely they are to be finding that content helpful.
• Session Duration/Page Depth: Looking at these two metrics for the overall site will give you a good idea of how effective the content you’re producing is to the overall user experience, and how extensively users are engaging with your website as a whole as a result.
• Social Engagement: If you share your content on social media, monitor the traffic that comes through that source and how it behaves by utilizing UTM parameters that are linked to your analytics account. Keep track of how people are responding to your content by paying attention to audience follower growth and the amount of likes, shares, comments, and retweets on each of your pieces of content.

Data Driven Content Marketing Informs Success

With data backing what you produce, you can work on continual topic optimization and mold your content program into a tool that cannot only increase your business’ success in terms of online traffic and sales, but also position you and your team as thought leaders in your respective industries. By utilizing tools and programs that allow you to optimize your content, and then examining what’s working and what’s not, you can proactively develop a content program that is tailored to most closely fulfill the needs of your audience, and significantly improve rate that your business grows.

Building the perfect website is hard. From the right color scheme, to choosing a font that engages audiences, to making sure that technical SEO elements are perfect, there are a lot of different things that require a great deal of thought and effort in order to get right. However, one element really stands above all the rest in importance for any website that is trying to get a user to do something – whether that is buy a product, request a quote on a service, or learn new things about the value a business might provide them. This essential website item is known as a call to action button, and it can be unbelievably difficult to get right.

From choosing the right shape, to its placement on your website, there are a variety of different elements to consider when trying to create the best call to action buttons for your website. With so many different factors to consider, it is easy to get overwhelmed and settle on a button quickly and without much thought – but beware! The right call to action button can mean the difference between hundreds or even thousands of conversions over the lifetime of a website. A great place to look when you’re feeling stuck on what to do is to check out some examples of websites that are doing their calls to action correctly. Here are 8 of our favorites:

1) Uber

All of the best call to action buttons feature copy that gets users to click and see what comes next in a website’s conversion funnel process. However, an equally important part of any good call to action button is whether or not it stands out from the rest of the website it is on. For most pages with ctas, contrast is extremely critical when it comes to making sure that the button actually converts.

There are few better examples of consistent contrast usage than Uber’s website. The homepage features three separate background images that scroll behind a CTA button that doesn’t change in color, shape, or positioning on the page in the middle left-hand side of the site. It provides three versions of copy for three very different demographics. What is so interesting about this call to action, outside of contrast, is that the three scrolling backgrounds are effectively going after each of their target audiences – in order. First they go after riders with a very simple “sign up” copy, and then drivers with the same message. Finally they provide information for people who are interested in what the business is doing for the community through a “learn more” call to action.

While the copy isn’t particularly earth shattering in it’s originality, it is clear, to the point, and draws the eye so strongly that most user’s initial interaction with the website is almost solely based around the CTA’s location on the page.

2) Flex Studios

Call to action buttons come in lots of shapes and sizes – but all of the best ones offer an emotional trigger while standing in stark contrast to the rest of the page they are featured on. While CTAs are important, sometimes the actual emotional trigger that a CTA uses to be effective isn’t in the button – it’s in the copy that surrounds it.

A great example of this idea in action can be found on Flex Studios’ website. Featuring scrolling background images, the page changes the text that accompanies each image while giving a consistent green CTA button with the copy “Book a Class”. What’s particularly interesting about this site is that each set of copy provides different emotional triggers that could feasibly interest someone enough to book a class. The initial copy focuses on highlighting Flex’s location in New York City’s Union Square, as their target customer is in that area. For the second image and batch of copy they focus on the three different workouts they offer in an effort to get users to see what different classes they could book by clicking on the call to action. Finally, they highlight their discount pricing for a first class.

In this way the page and its CTA are not addressing just one possible emotional trigger that could get a user to click on it – but three. In this way the page is able to capture a variety of different users with different needs, and this is what makes the call to action button on the page one of the best around.

3) Crazyegg

While a simple button for users to “click to learn more” or “purchase a product” can be extremely effective, some of the best call to action buttons are a lot more interactive and serve as a way to push people down the conversion funnel as opposed to acting as a final step before a purchase.

A great example of an interactive CTA leading to great results for a business is Crazyegg’s website. The homepage is extremely simple – it features the company’s logo and poses a very simple question that a lot of users want to know the answer to: “What’s making your visitors leave?” It then goes one step further and provides a solution by suggesting that audiences find out by entering their website and then click on an extremely alluring CTA – “Show Me My Heatmap”.

This call to action is so effective because it primes users by presenting and then offering a simple solution to a problem. By the time they end up on the next page, they really want an answer to the question Crazyegg posted on their homepage, and are much more likely to sign up for the service as a result. The whole process is a phenomenal example of emotional triggers combining with user interaction to get a business tons of conversions in the most efficient way possible.

4) medCPU

Sometimes the best call to action buttons are the most subtle. While this would seem to go against all logic, if your product is a sizable investment, sometimes it’s important to keep your call to action present, but secondary to providing audiences with information about why they need to purchase what you’re offering.

For B2B healthcare provider MedCPU, this was certainly the case. A technology solution for hospitals, their product is not something someone would buy on a whim – they need as much information as possible beforehand. As a result, the call to action button at the top of the page, “How It Works”, is a very soft call to action not in the vein of a “buy now!” or a “sign up”, because most users aren’t going to be at the step in the conversion process upon initial entry to the site – they need to learn more about the product first.

It’s only when users get to the bottom of the page and have read everything medCPU can do for their business that they are presented with a much stronger set of calls to action to “Contact Us” and “Request A Demo”. This site is a great example of an initial call to action that is subtle, but moves users along the conversion process in a non-intrusive way, teaming up with a much harder sales-centric call to action later on in the user’s journey through the website.

5) Litmus

We’ve already discussed how the content on the rest of the page can affect a call to action’s worth to a business – but lack of content can play a role as well. This is particularly true in above-the-fold calls to action on a website’s homepage, where text and image clutter can distract users from seeing (and clicking on) what would otherwise be a perfectly decent call to action button.

One of the best examples of spacing leading to a call to action button that converts is on email provider Litmus’ site. Their orange call to action button, which reads “Get started now”, would be pretty efficient on most sites – but with how they’ve structured their page it works even better. In particular, their use of an extremely high quality image of a desktop with their email testing suite open in the background, paired with their call to action is impressive. It provides imagery that answers the “why” of their CTA – mainly that their product suite looks great and provides result. There are two lines of text above the CTA that answer the “why” to really drive this idea home.

While this is all impressive and effective in terms of making sure the call to action button performs, what is important here is that a single background image, two lines of text, and standard navigation elements are all users have to contend with outside of content that users have to scroll down to see the rest of. This means that a CTA that is already prominent gets even more prominence on the page – driving more conversions as a result.

6) Spotify

When a website has two unique goals it can be difficult to choose which one to prominently display. We’re already gone through a couple examples of how scrolling background images can be used to solve this issue – but they clearly pose a problem in terms of click-through-rate as your calls to actions on the second and third scrolling images get less face time and less opportunities to drive clicks as a result. If your business is facing this problem, sometimes it’s a better idea to go with two calls to action side-by-side using different color schemes and font choices.

One of the best calls to action that demonstrates this concept in practice can be found on music streaming service Spotify. Spotify has two clear goals when it comes what they want to do with their online presence – drive as much usage of their platform as possible, while simultaneously trying to convince existing and new users that purchasing their premium package is a worthwhile investment. In order to make sure that both actions can be feasibly taken from their homepage they feature two call to action buttons side-by-side that are designed quite differently. Their “Go Premium” CTA features bold white text on a green background, while their “Play Free” button features black text transparently overlayed on their background image. It’s clear that the primary goal of the site is to drive premium sign-ups as a result of both style and positioning (buttons and clickable navigation elements to the left of a page tend to drive more clicks) of the buttons – but at the same time it’s very easy for users looking to listen for free to find what they’re looking for as well.

7) Unbounce

A lot of the highest-converting calls to action do a phenomenal job of incorporating testimonials on their pages without detracting from their button’s conversion rates. While this might seem relatively simple in practice, getting a testimonial on a page that actually provides value while not pulling user attention away from a call to action button is anything but child’s play. There’s a very fragile balance between allaying some user’s fears of buying your product or service while not negatively impacting those who would otherwise convert with you without a second thought.

A great example of a website that does this perfectly is Unbounce, a landing page creation service. They do an impressive job using vertical space to make sure that their call to action is the star of the show while still including a testimonial. The button itself is big, contrasts nicely with their background color, and features the extremely engaging copy, “build a high-converting landing page now” in big white letters. It’s hard not to be immediately drawn to the call to action – but it’s clear that Unbounce knows that there might be some concerns about their product, so they go to great lengths to make everything as clear as possible. Not only do they map out the exact steps for using their service in the simplest terms possible, they provide a testimonial at the very bottom of the page right below the fold. This way the testimonial is there for users who are looking for it, but the person’s face and the quote they’ve give about how useful Unbounce is doesn’t distract users who have their minds made up about the service and just need to have their attention driven to the CTA button.

8) Giftrocket

Sometimes the best way to get someone to buy your product is to simply get them started with the purchase process. While this is a rare case, occasionally people will see the value that your product brings as they fill out each required step to complete the purchase process. This is particularly true for the gift-giving industry, where the initial purchase step is intimidating, but the feel-good effects of giving a gift to someone helps steer a user to completion once they start the process.

In this instance, the call to action buttons are tailored so that they make the process seem easy, and not intimidating to users. While you might be slightly misrepresenting the difficulty of sending a gift, once you get a user to click on a button with the intention of buying someone a gift, you can rely on the feel-good power of doing so in order to offset the slight misrepresentation of how easy the process is going to be. There are very few businesses that take advantage of this strategy as efficiently as GiftRocket.

Their CTA, “Send a GiftRocket” dramatically underplays how difficult their service is to use. While it isn’t rocket science (pun intended) to get through their relatively simple fields – it does require you take about 5 minutes to sit down and fill everything out. It isn’t quite as simple as snapping your fingers and immediately sending a GiftRocket, as the CTA would suggest. That being said, because the ease of use expectation is set before a user starts the process and they’re going to be sending a gift – they stick with the process. After all, who starts buying a gift for someone they care about and then stops halfway through – even if the CTA is slightly misleading?

The Best Call to Action Buttons are Tested

Without a doubt these are 8 of the best designed call to action buttons out there in terms of the amount of thought and time that have clearly been put into them. Most of them have been on their respective sites for some time, and all signs point to them being extremely effective converters of traffic. However, it is important to note that just because a call to action button looks nice, doesn’t always mean it will function correctly. At the end of the day the purpose of a call to action button is to convert traffic – not look pretty. So don’t just create a great looking call to action button and think of the task as done and dusted. Test it! You’d be surprised by how often data can go against common conceptions of utility and beauty when it comes to calls to action on a website.

What is the best call to action button example you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments section below.

For anyone unfamiliar with public speaking or sharing their ideas in front of a large group, the idea of a presentation can be overwhelming. For some people, even presenting in front of a few people can cause jitters. However, at most companies where teamwork or creativity is encouraged, presentations are a common occurrence and mastering presenting skills is crucial as a result.

When you’re showing design-related projects to clients, the manner in which your designs are presented is often just as important as the material itself. Whether you are lacking confidence, or not fully explaining the reasoning behind your idea, you run the risk of leaving clients disappointed and unimpressed. The same concept goes for internal presentations at your company—without utilizing best practices for presenting, your ideas may seem mediocre and unfulfilling.

In order to grow existing relationships with clients, to win the hearts of new clients, or to impress and motivate your co-workers or supervisors, consider the following 10 tips when you’re sharing your team’s latest design projects:

1. Be Prepared

Like with most things in life, preparation is crucial. To make sure you’re comfortable with the ideas you’re speaking about, and to familiarize yourself with some of the key terms you want to cover, take time to organize yourself and ensure you’ve done your prep work. Many people assume that you need to spend hours upon hours on this aspect of the presentation process, however that typically isn’t the case. If you’ve done all the work leading up to this point appropriately and correctly, you only need a little bit of time to walk yourself through the presentation one final time.

2. Act Naturally

Public speaking is one of the top fears people have, and since presenting is a form of public speaking, it’s no surprise that for some people, anxiety can take over. To avoid this, focus on the points you feel strongly about. Remember that the clients or supervisors you’re sharing your work with are people too and that if you act naturally the entire presentation will go much better. Familiarity and confidence in what you’re presenting make it easier to act naturally.

Photo Credit: PrintMag.com

3. Know Who Is On the Other Side

Think about how you would feel if you were working with yourself—and the way you and your team operate on a project. Remember that you’re dealing with the time, money, and expectation of someone else and keep that in mind as you highlight certain points of the project.

4. Personalize All Elements

Chances are that you’ve met with whomever your presenting once before to understand the needs, requirements, or expectations for the project. As you present, make it clear that you’ve heard what they had to say during prior meetings, and have taken that fully into consideration as you crafted the designs you’re sharing with them. Create a checklist of concerns or requests that have been vocalized, and as they come up in the presentation of the project, point out that you’ve done something a certain way to meet their wishes. Reinforcing the decisions you made throughout a logo design or the design of a webpage (even if they are something you always do) shows that the project is custom designed for that particular client, or for your boss’ taste.

5. Don’t Let Nerves Get the Best of You

If you’re nervous, it’s easy to say filler words as you speak. Saying things such as “you know?” or “like” or “um” can easily fill up a nervous conversation. While these terms may seem trivial, they can be distracting to anyone listening to you and make you appear unsure. Even if you’re 100% confident in the project and the material you’re presenting, those terms can take away some of your credibility. The best way to overcome the habit of using filler words is to make a conscientious effort to avoid them while you’re speaking. It’s okay to take a pause if you need a second or two to think about what to say.

6. Say It Once

For major points you’re addressing, it may be your natural instinct to spend a great amount of time focusing on them or repeating what you’ve said. Saying things like “So, as I said…” or “Once again” give the impression that the person you’re presenting to does not understand what you’re saying. Instead, at the culmination of the meeting, offer the opportunity to revisit any aspect of the presentation that needs reiteration.

7. Be Spontaneous

You don’t always have to stick to the precise plan you’ve outlined. You shouldn’t be reading from a script, and should be using any slides or notes merely as a starting point for what you’re discussing. Don’t be afraid to be spontaneous and verbally add or reduce the amount of time you spend on certain sections.

8. Be Positive, No Matter What

Positivity can go a long way. It instills trust in you and your team, and helps build credibility for your business and the quality of work that you do. If the ideas you present aren’t receiving as much positive acclaim as you had imagined, don’t become overly defensive. When alternatives or changes are suggested, instead explain that you can definitely explore the opportunity and that it’s not a problem. Even if you oppose the opinions that are vocalized, consider them post-meeting and create new ideas that are more aligned with the suggestions.

9. Read Cues from Reactions

To expand on the idea of being spontaneous during your presentation, always pay attention to subtle cues as you discuss certain points of the design. If the client seems really interested in a particular design element, spend more time going into further specifics on it than you had originally planned. Plan the general outline of the presentation, but always allow reactions to help you determine what you should spend more or less time on.

 

Photo Credit: LMF Design

10. Own It

Even if you didn’t personally create every piece of the design, it’s important you be responsible for and a part of the whole project. Perhaps it’s a logo design and you created the structure of the design, but had no role in the color choice or font style used. If you’re receiving negative reviews on the logo color, it’s a bad idea to pass blame onto some else. Note that the color choice is not favored, and explain that you can easily change it to a preferred choice.

Effective Tips for Design Presentations

Collectively using these tips during your next presentation can help the success of your design project. Presentations aren’t always going to go seamlessly well. There are bound to be hiccups and issues now and then—it happens. Don’t let one failure keep you away from sharing your ideas again in the future. Learn from the errors you make, and allow mistakes to be lessons for the future.

Today, as users, we’re constantly on-the-go. The majority of website visits start on mobile devices, and according to eMarketer, Mcommerce sales for US retail will be increasing with each coming year. As a result, optimizing website accessibility and user experience on tablets, smartphones, and every device imaginable is becoming increasingly important in order for all businesses to stay relevant. To accommodate users, websites that are designed responsively are typically the best option available.

Responsive design is an approach to web development by which a website is planned, designed, and developed to appear optimally in a range of devices. The phrase “appear optimally” refers to a page being readable, easy-to-navigate, and usable with minimal panning and scrolling. Responsive Design is not just a method or technique – it is a fundamental ideology about how a site is designed and built.

What Is A Responsive Web Design?

Responsive design is a front-end development process intended for molding website design and user experience to the user’s device, whether desktop, tablet, or mobile.

In responsive, a cascading style sheet (CSS)—essentially what defines the format and layout of a web page, is leveraged to permit a website to scale to the width of a browser, independent of device type. Javascript and js libraries such as JQuery and Modernizr are also used to accompany this behavior for resizing more dynamic objects like masonry galleries as well as converting mouse activities to touch activities.

Unlike adaptive design or mobile detection, responsive design does not leverage device detection, so rather than querying the device with backend logic, CSS media queries are used to determine things like the width and orientation of the device screen—your browser.

Basics of Responsive Design

Two basic principles exist in responsive design, the use of breakpoints and fluid scaling:

Breakpoints

CSS3 media queries create conditional boundaries at which the width of a specific device type’s browser will then trigger alternate styles. Here at Web Designer Vip, we generally use maximum-width breakpoint, to create a desktop-first (scale down) build versus a minimum-width boundary, for a mobile-first (scale up) build. Queries can also be used to determine height and even device orientation.

Breakpoint sizes (we’ll use widths from here on out) can be set in px or em. The differentiation in modern browsers is negligible, though, compared to a few years back. Breakpoints can be set at any size but they tend to align with the most common dimensions of each Desktop, Tablet Portrait, Mobile Landscape, and Mobile Portrait. Generally speaking, these tend to be 1200/960px, 768px, 480px, and 320px, wide respectively, though industry standards are constantly changing as new devices are released.

Over the years, these types of devices have begun to blend into one another, especially with the introduction of retina displays. As a result, you might find two devices can match the same breakpoint (ie. tablet landscape and laptop) but might also find that a particular device has a unique size, so that’s where the next principle comes into play.

Fluidity

Fluid scaling can be achieved in a few different ways, but it will always involve percentage or em values to permit a container to scale within the bounds of its parent elements, and ultimately the browser. Fluid scaling is necessary to achieve responsiveness between breakpoints, to maximize your real estate, as well as to maintain the flow of columns in a responsive grid.

A simple example of a fluidly scaling object would be an HTML page consisting of one block with width of 100% and a height of “auto”. As the browser changes width, the block scales with it, proportionally. Where you choose to apply this scaling at the granular level is up to you but fluidity should always exist at the top level of any responsive container.

Another popular example of fluidity is a grid layout. In a grid layout, virtual blocks are aligned and evenly distributed over the width of the body of a site or container. These blocks are fixed in width, aligned as inline-blocks, with a parent container which is fluidly scaling. By doing tis, when the browser (and ultimately, the container) reaches the point at which the sum of all blocks exceeds its parent container, the blocks break to the next line. These blocks are referred to as columns and each block could also represent a number of columns.

For instance, if you have 3 blocks, they could represent 9 columns, at 3 columns each. Once you’ve scaled down to a width that fits 2 blocks, at 3 columns each, with the 3rd on the next row, you’re now looking at an 8 column layout, with 2 columns of margin. Scale down further to close out the margin and you’re looking at a 6 column layout with no margin.

Design

Grid layouts may also be used across an entire website, including sidebars and body content. As a result, many websites are designed on grids, flowing from left to right, top to bottom (just like germanic and latin-based written languages).

In order to present the optimally responsive layout for a grid, we start by selecting the known device widths from our knowledge of breakpoints. Using these figures, we calculate the nearest figure of the site width and number of columns, which divide into the greatest number of whole factors. We must do this without compromising the content’s real estate much (so don’t go overboard). One of the most popular systems is the 960grid system, which is often used in 12 columns. Two side-by-side blocks taking up the full width of a page is therefore each 6 and 6 columns respectively, in a 12 column grid.

 

Photo Credit: Tutsplus.com
When designing and developing for responsive, we place emphasis on retaining the structure and order of elements from desktop through mobile. This permits fluid scaling while also reducing unnecessary load of duplicate elements that are hidden or shown at specific breakpoints.

Responsive Design at Web Designer Vip

At Web Designer Vip, our 2015 standards for responsive design include options for a standard 960 grid, requiring designs for desktop and mobile, as well as a widescreen 1200px or 1280px grid requiring designs for widescreen, tablet or 960, and mobile. All interim stages are either snapped via breakpoints, to the next breakpoint size, or fluidly scaling – the complexity of the design and scope of the project will dictate that decision.

Our talented development team includes full stack developers as well as frontend specialists, all of whom are trained in responsive practices and are evaluated on a quarterly basis. We perform quality checks of all the major browsers and aforementioned breakpoint widths both manually and using a proprietary screenshotting service built off of PhantomJs, as well as with manual device testing with our in-house QA engineers.

Optimizing User-Experience

Regardless of your industry or the products and services your company offers, user-experience on your website should be of the utmost importance. With responsive design, your audience will always be able to engage seamlessly with your site on each of their devices, at any given time. Mobile and tablet use is becoming more and more prevalent, and to succeed with your online presence, your website should be optimized for those devices and their users.

Remember when you set up your first email account? You’ve probably been through countless email addresses since then for various reasons–a change in taste, or more likely, a need for an email address that sounded more professional. Your email addresses back then was essentially your username, so we had “dorky” IDs that we likely would be embarrassed to share as contact information today. Email has evolved into one of the most important forms of online identification, and nearly everything on the web that you create an account for now requires a valid email address.

So, if the basic concept behind naming email addresses has drastically changed, you can bet that the marketing aspect of email has transformed as well. Just as you would be embarrassed to have to explain your decades-old email address, you don’t want to be embarrassed when explaining during a company presentation how you lost potential leads and customers with outdated and ineffective email marketing tactics that didn’t include strategies like personalized email. In order to help make sure this never happens, here are three email marketing tips you should follow to get the most out of your email campaigns.

Focus on the Personalized Email Process

Repeat after me: “Not all emails are meant to generate an online sale.” Again. Not all emails are meant to generate an online sale. Users that visit your website and sign up for more content via email are all motivated by the different things that your website has to offer, and they are all at different points of the conversion funnel.

However, companies are often too distracted with sealing the deal and getting conversions or sales so they often send the same sales-oriented email newsletter to each and every user. While it certainly is easy to do things this way, this method is no longer as effective in the modern era. Users will get annoyed when you place priority on trying to foster a conversion through your emails and appearing overly concerned with driving sales without including messaging that is at all related to the overriding reason they signed up to receive emails from you in the first place. Find out how and why users decided to give you their email address, and present them with content, imagery, and links that they’ll find valuable based on why they signed up.

For example, if you have a fashion site that sells a myriad of designer clothing and you also have a blog that gives style tips, fashion advice, and information about what’s trending now, it is reasonable to assume that someone may visit your site interested in updating their wardrobe, while someone else may come to your site through your blog. If both sign up for your emails, they’re likely anticipating different things from your brand. As a result, sending the same mailer to both users will likely leave someone feeling as if you don’t understand who they are as a customer and that you aren’t interested in what they are actually to learn from your business.

Take a few moments to plan out the process of where users are in the conversion process as well as how they will read, interact, and click through to landing pages from your emails. By doing this instead of focusing on immediately converting all of your email recipients into sales, you should see a considerable bump in your end goal (often conversions) without being overly sales-centric with your email content.

Send One to Two Personalized Emails A Week

If this was a guide on how to get users to unsubscribe from your emails or marking your emails as spam, I would suggest that you send them an email every single day. However, this is a guide on how to use your email marketing more effectively, so I suggest that you send one to two emails a week at most, and don’t click that send button any more after that.

Do research on the most favorable time and day that your target demographic will check and respond to their email and schedule out your campaigns accordingly. Each email that you send to your users should offer interesting and fresh content that will intrigue them and encourage them to click on prominent calls to action. For example, if you are having a “BOGO” or “50% off everything” sale, and it’s is a week long, it will not create a sense of urgency if your users get an email for 7 days straight reminding them of your amazing sale. “Inbox fatigue” and “email fatigue” are real terms, and in my own email marketing experience, even some of the more well-known brands don’t realize that they are driving online users away with the constant reminder of their existence in their inbox. Do not be that company. Receiving an email from your business should be a pleasant surprise and should be something that users look forward to receiving, not a daily nuisance.

Timing is Key for Email Personalization

I flew to Atlanta this past weekend to catch up with old friends, and I bought my tickets through an online travel company. They emailed me the day before and a couple hours ahead of my flight to check in online so I could skip the line, and linked me to a webpage that I could scan as my boarding pass. I loved the email check-ups and reminders up until I landed and turned on my phone. While I was still on the runway, I received a “How was your flight?” email. This email didn’t come as I was going through baggage claim or after I had gotten home from the airport, it came as soon as I landed. It may sound like an overreaction, but this is a good example of NOT giving users their space when sending them a follow-up email. As soon as I hit the runway post-flight, the first thing I want to be able to do is call my friends and family to let them know I have landed safely and check for any missed personal emails, texts, or phone calls – not get bombarded with emails that should realistically arrive around the time I check in to my hotel.

Research has shown that follow-up emails, especially for abandoned shopping carts, are great at re-engaging users and influencing purchases. What’s often not included in this research is the timing of when those emails were sent out. As I’ve hinted at earlier, timing when it comes to email marketing is essential and you want to send your follow-up or reminder emails at the right time to retain customer lifetime value and foster positive user engagement.

Effective Email Marketing is Personalized

Ultimately, the most efficient way to confirm that your email marketing initiatives are proving beneficial to your organization is to do a thorough examination of whether or not they are driving increases in key metrics. Whatever you use as your email platform, be sure to take a look at things like click-through-rates and open-rates to discover areas for improvement, and see what types of emails are providing you with the best results. By following best practices and tweaking your messages so that they are tailored to each individual user’s wants and needs, you’ll find your organization will convert more customers, and produce a higher ROI from email marketing efforts.