VisionSnap: October 2006

Website Design: Welcome The White Space
By Scott Lindsay

Individuals who are new to website development will often compartmentalize the web page and fill every available space with either text or graphics.

After all, why shouldn't you maximize the site design by including as much information as possible?

There seems to be an underlying fear that if there is ‘white space' the website will look incomplete. The term white space is a common term in publishing. For instance when a newspaper is developing an advertisement they will seek to allow for some areas of the advertisement to be free from text or graphics. Most publishers have learned that white space provides a sophisticated look while drawing attention to a very specific selling point.

The best way to describe it is to use music as an example. There are times when musicians will use a very roots-oriented approach to their music. They may sing with only a guitar. This approach of stripping away everything else helps the listener experience a more intimate encounter with the music. Sometimes adding more actually reduces the overall effectiveness of the music or, in the case of web design, the message.

If your online visitor has to take a significant amount of time to locate the important information they hoped to find on a web page they will likely lose interest rapidly.

Cable television contains reality television shows that attempt to help individuals sell their property. In most cases the very first thing the experts note is the clutter that may be distracting guests from visualizing the possibilities of the property. The experts will generally paint rooms a neutral color and most of the furnishings are removed from the home. The episodes generally end with the homeowners with a contract and very impressive reviews from those attending an open house.

Many web designers are reverting to a more minimalist approach to their webpage design. The use of links is a key strategy while removing unwanted clutter.

The use of great photos and a significant amount of organized white space allow visitors to concentrate on the reason they came to the webpage in the first place.

Another reason white space may be an important element in site design is to allow for the inclusion of advertising. If you fill every available space you eliminate advertisement from being a consideration on your webpage. In effect you may be driving away customers and advertisers at the same time.

For some, the thought of intentionally carving out white space in a web design requires a new way of thinking. I would encourage you to take some time and visit some of the most successful websites and see how much white space exists. What can you eliminate from your site design that gives it room to breathe?

The 6 C's Of Marketing Unleashed

Okay, so we have all learned about the 4P's of marketing in undergrad: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. If not, you can open up one of your old marketing text books, blow off the dust and read about it there. The 6 C's, however, is a not a concept that replaces the 4 P's; rather, it just expands on the promotion element and provides a more granular approach to consumer marketing.

CUSTOMER:

In this day and age, a company's marketing strategy needs to be customer focused. It's about understanding the target consumer; their wants, needs and motivations. Not as demographics, psychographics or any other graphics, but as real people. Its understanding why customers do what they do (or don't do),when they do it and why they do it. Such knowledge is critical in marketing since having a strong understanding of buyer behavior will help shed light on what is important to the customer. It's about focusing on the target customer first and then working back to the brand. It's imperative that companies have mindshare before focusing on market share.

CONSISTENCY:

Companies need to maintain consistency in their message; a practice called integrated marketing communications - from packaging and advertising to sales promotion and publicity. This will maintain and reinforce a brand's personality and image in a real life context and avoid doing something brainless like changing the distinctive color of the UPS truck to orange. I am sure it's been talked about.

CREATIVITY:

Creativity is imperative to attract attention in a world cluttered with thousands of messages. Creativity means laying aside the rules, and engages in out-of-box thinking so that marketers can reach beyond logic and structure and tap into their imaginations.

* Creativity Informs: Marketing's responsibility to inform is greatly enhanced by creativity. Creativity makes marketing more vivid, and many researchers believe vividness attracts attention, maintains interest, and stimulates consumers' thinking.

* Creativity Persuades: The ancients Greeks created legends and myths about gods and heroes -symbols for humankind's instinctive longings and fears - to influence human behavior and thought. Today's marketers are doing the same thing; they are creating new myths, heroes and symbols like Ronald McDonald, the "Can You Hear Me Now" guy from Verizon, and more recently the Gecko from Geico Insurance.

* Creativity Reminds: Imagine using the same invitation, without any creativity, to remind people to try a particular product everyday for a month. The invitation would become stale very quickly. Only creativity can transform boring reminders into interesting, entertaining marketing communications. Nike is proof. Several commercials in a Nike campaign never mention the company name or even spelled it out on the screen. Each communication told a story. And, the only on-screen cue identifying the sponsor was a single "swoosh" logo inscribed on the final scene.

CULTURE:

All marketing communications needs cross-cultural research to be able to succeed. It's simple to see things from your own perspective, assuming that everyone else in the world thinks exactly like you and should understand what's so great about your product or service. Just reading about all the mistakes made by large corporations proves that even the most sizable and experienced marketers have made errors time and again.

One of the most famous examples is Coca Cola translating the name into Chinese without back-translating it ("bite the wax tadpole"), ultimately resulting in a horrible response from an insulted society. Marketing books are full of examples like these. As David Ogilvy, known as the Father of Advertising, states, "If you are trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think".

COMMUNICATION:

This one is basic. Consumers don't want to be "marketed to". Rather, they want to be "communicated with". Good marketing communication creates value with target customers, speaks in their language and tells your story. It's about building long term, trustworthy, and profitable relationships with your customers. As Seth Godin states, it's about reinforcing the lies that consumers tell themselves everyday (i.e. I look much better in these jeans from Abercrombie; they make me look sexy).

CHANGE:

Marketing is not just a business function, but a process. There is a beginning, middle, but there is never an end. Marketers must constantly CHANGE as society changes. They should never be afraid to try something new. Marketing today is not what it was 2 - 5 - or even 20 years ago. Marketing needs to be an evolving process that considers change in the world, economy, market, consumers; as well as internal change within the organization.

Conclusion (not the 7th C)

So there it is; the 6 C's of marketing - Customer, Consistency - Creativity - Culture - Communication and Change. I am sure that these will be published in every text book in the country within the next ten years and I will be a rich, well known author. Yeah right!

Elements To Improve Web Site Navigation

By David Davis

As you browse the Web, you will find sites that implement just about every type of navigation scheme you can think of and then even some more!

However, certain common factors do emerge. The use of menu bars, either horizontally or vertically oriented, are the most common way of allowing users to move through your site.

Sites with a great deal of content often implement dynamic menu bars that change to present the most relevant options on each page. Sites often use some kind of "feedback" or special effect to let users know where certain navigation elements are located, such as graphics that change colors when the users point their mouse at them.

You can use a variety of technologies and design elements to implement Web site navigation. As you consider different navigation techniques, keep the following seven basic comparison factors in mind:

Visual

Does the technique look like a navigation element that users are accustomed to seeing? In other words, is it a button or a menu that users will recognize as a navigation element?

Feedback

Does the technique offer some form of feedback to indicate that a user has pointed at or clicked a particular navigation element? This type of feedback can be important because users often explore a site by moving their mouse around to see what happens. Navigation techniques that allow individual elements to respond to this activity make the overall navigation more likely to succeed.

Accessibility

How does the technique work when a visually impaired person attempts to use the site with a specially equipped Web browser? If this demographic is important to your company, pay special attention to this capability.

Overhead

Some techniques require the server to transfer more data to the Web browser than is required by other techniques. If your customers will be accessing the site over slower connections, then using techniques with a high overhead will result in slow page loads, and possibly bored customers who will give up and move on to the competition.

Scalability

Does the technique offer any particular advantages to make growing the site easier? Some navigation designs may require you to redesign the entire site every time a new feature is added. Others may simply require a few minor modifications to add several new departments to a menu.

Space

Some techniques, combined with your site's browsing philosophy, require considerable space on the screen. Other techniques allow you to present a wider array of navigation choices while using less screen space. Keep in mind that your navigation elements should never occupy the majority of the screen. It is the content that your customers came for, not the menu bars.

Compatibility

How well will this technique work within the available range of Web browsers? If one of your objectives is to have your site usable by as many customers as possible, pay attention to the techniques that offer a broad range of compatibility, and steer away from those that are limited to a smaller set of browsers.

Navigation Technologies

To implement Web site navigation, you can use one of four primary technologies. The oldest and simplest of these technologies is the basic, static HTML page. A step up from that is the static HTML page, which is dynamically generated on the Web server. Web pages can be given more interactive capabilities with Dynamic HTML (DHTML), whether programmed in VBScript or JavaScript. Java presents the opportunity to program a complete, standalone application to use as a navigation aid.

Static HTML

Static HTML links are the oldest and simplest form of navigation on the Web. They can be less exciting than their dynamic counterparts, but remain one of the most effective navigational techniques on the Web.

Dynamically Generated Static HTML

If your site is constantly growing and changing, static HTML will require a constant effort to keep the navigational elements in line with the site's growth. A common solution to this problem has been to dynamically generate the navigation elements when the page displays. When using the DHTML, you don't have to manually update elements as the site grows, because an automated process generates the navigation elements as necessary, based on the information in a database.

VBScript and JavaScript Dynamic HTML

DHTML is a technology that allows you to embed programming code in the Web pages that are sent to user's computers. DHTML code actually executes within the users Web browser, and can change the appearance and content of the Web page in response to the user's actions on the page.

In Finality

You can use a variety of technologies and design elements to implement Web site navigation. As you consider different navigation techniques, keep the above seven basic comparison factors in mind. Visitors are becoming rarer and rarer in this competitive globe of e-commerce. Retain those who visit your site for longer periods in order to convert them