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12 March 2010

Lead gen pages are often misunderstood as standalone, single-page designs. There’s a science behind A/B testing and optimizing lead gen pages, but there’s also a component of creative user experience that should not be overlooked as you drill deeply into what drives your users through your conversion funnel.

Some user behaviors make clear sense, while others can confound your expectations. Overall, however, designing a complete experience around a conversion page is best understood taking these 3 “Ss” into consideration:

  1. SomewhereUsers get to conversion pages from somewhere, so go there first!
  2. SuperficialGood looks matter. Users respond to a particular aesthetic, so try different designs!
  3. So Much MoreUsers engage deeper through community, so get them connected to you and each other! (FYI a Facebook Fan Page is a great ecosystem & it’s free)

Okay, so few weeks ago I posted about a redesign I’m working on for a lead generation page. That project began with a single page, but preliminary outcomes further demonstrated that we needed to step backwards and design for an entire experience, which is where Somewhere, Superficial, and So Much More came into play.

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Future of Web Design London May 17-19 2010

11 March 2010

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.

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10 March 2010

Future of Web Design London 2010

Editors Note: In his first article for Think Vitamin Thierry Koblentz discusses the issue of “resetting” your CSS.

“base.css” versus “reset.css”

For a long time, the very first line in my styles sheets was:

* {padding:0;margin:0;}

This simple rule was very convenient as it leveled margin and padding values of all elements across browsers. This “hard reset” was short and simple and it had the advantage of belonging to the main styles sheet rather than being an external file.

Later, this technique was denounced as bad practice as it makes the rendering agent style (check) every single element in a document. It also triggered issues with form controls, but authors were used to specifying styles for these.

Then came “reset” styles sheets. These files go way beyond resetting margin and padding. The most complete in terms of properties/elements involved has to be Eric Meyer’s. It “unstyles” everything you could think of, from a to var.

Authors start with a clean slate. From there, they most often write rules to style elements that were originally styled by the browser’s styles sheet, but overwritten by the reset file. In short, many elements are styled three times:

  1. by the browser’s styles sheet (see User Agent Styles Sheets).
  2. by the “reset” file.
  3. by the author’s styles sheet.

Criticism of this Approach

Jonathan Snook, Jens Meiert and others have “criticized” this approach, saying more or less that there was no use for a “middle man”. On Jen’s site, “randomCommenter” summarizes the issue pretty well when asking: “Wouldn’t a well written base style sheet render a reset style sheet redundant and therefore useless?”

Actually, I believe Eric Meyer himself hints in that direction when he says:

“I don’t particularly recommend that you just use this in its unaltered state in your own projects. It should be tweaked, edited, extended, and otherwise tuned to match your specific reset baseline. Fill in your preferred colors for the page, links, and so on. In other words, this is a starting point, not a self-contained black box of no-touchiness.”

In any case, people should at least evaluate the rules in these reset files before copying and pasting their content. For example, if one authors documents as HTML 4.01 Strict! one may safely remove from a reset styles sheets any reference to elements like:

  • iframe
  • applet
  • strike
  • u
  • font
  • s
  • center

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Future of Web Design London May 17-19 2010

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