Archive: Business

Strategy. You hear about it all the time. One must have a strategy/work on a strategy/follow a strategy and so on. Business types like to say “strategy” a lot as it sounds big, complicated and important.

And it is important, but there is no need for it to be complicated. Quite the opposite.

At the heart of it all “strategy” is just about having a plan for the thing you are working on. Or as Wikipedia puts it “a strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal”.

Getting the Strategy Right

If there is ever a time to look at what’s important in a project, it is early on, in the strategy stage.

Let us assume that your client doesn’t have a strategy for their next web project.

Before you build, design, code or write anything you need to think about what the project needs to achieve.

This is in part because strategy can mean almost anything, depending on the needs of the client, the size of their audience and ultimately the goal of your client. And it will mean different things at different times during the life-span of a project: you may have one strategy to launch with, another for the ongoing management of the site and so on.

Thinking the project through, seeing how one thing leads to another on the way to the project’s goal is a very healthy thing to do.

The one thing all strategies must have in common is that they tie in with your client’s overall business goals. (You’d be surprised how often clients themselves forget this simple fact!) If it doesn’t, the client will never be happy with your work even if they were the ones who ignored the business goal connection.

That’s why you should be thrilled when a client asks for your help in developing their web project strategy (or asks you to help them find someone who can create it for them).

It is an excellent opportunity to make sure that you, or the people you choose to collaborate with, create a to-the-point strategy that helps the client reach their goals and in the process makes you look like an absolute star who deserves lots more commissions. (more…)

Editors Note: In his first article for Think Vitamin Matthew Smith, Principal Designer at Squared Eye Design, discusses the benefits, risks and infrastructure required to work effectively with fellow freelancers.

Working Alone

Working alone can be great. There’s a pleasant autonomy of knowing exactly what you’re  doing and when. There are few unknowns. You work directly with the client and don’t have to worry about managing others.

In the past I’ve done everything from branding, strategy, IA, design, front-end dev, and CMS integration on a single project. These days, if I’m working alone, its usually providing PSDs to a client who has an internal dev team or something similar. I love it!

These projects are less complex than my collaborative projects, so life is simple. But if I limit myself to the size  and quantity of projects that I’m able to complete all on my own, my business will stagnate. If I am unwilling to pursue entrepreneurship and management, I will forever remain a technician.

Be a Jumbo Shrimp

Growth isn’t for everyone, but for me it’s a matter of defining my future. I want to be a Jumbo Shrimp — a big presence in a niche area. I don’t want to simply design interfaces for the next 30 years; I want to change the world – even if only in a small way. Growth can magnify my ability to directly affect positive change. (more…)

Does design of a sales page matter? Traditional reasoning says that the product always remains the same no matter how you dress it up on the sales page. So, one should focus on making the product more awesome rather than investing time to make it look awesome. Well, the reasoning sounds plausible in theory but the data says it is not well grounded.

Case Study

This post is about a recent A/B split testing case study where a redesign of a sales page resulted in 20% increase in sales. AquaSoft is a leading software company in the area of digital photo presentation. They have a complete portfolio of (desktop) software products related to photos – slideshow creation, desktop publishing, photo books, etc. Their software products can be downloaded for a free limited duration trial, following which a customer pays for the full version.

AquaSoft undertake more than 10 A/B tests per month using Visual Website Optimizer, an online A/B testing tool. They recently finished a test in which they tested their existing sales page against a new redesigned sales page. Note that this page wasn’t the free trial download page; rather it was a sales page where customers visit to actually buy the software.

Here is the control version of the page (click to view full version):

And here is the (final) redesigned version (click to view full version):

(more…)