Red Kite Creative

ux

Weekly Links Roundup – Thanking Customers, Old Content, Too Many Choices, Trello

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Making sure your customers know you appreciate them is an ongoing and critical task for business owners. Here are some ideas for thanking your customers from Constant Contact.

What to do with the old content on your website is another constant question. Here are some good ideas for dealing with old content from Yoast. Don’t forget that you shouldn’t just delete an old post – if the old post has good-quality links pointing to it and you have a new post that fills the shoes of the old one, you’ll need to add a 301 redirect from the old post to the newer one; or if you just really want to delete that old content forever make sure you read the part about 410 Gone.

Is your site cluttered? Does the user who arrives on the home page have any clue what they should do next? Sometimes the problem with a design is not a lack of direction, but too many choices! Studies show that the more choices a user is given, the less likely they are to get to a conversion. Learn about how to both simplify and group user choices for better results.

Finally… a non-marketing link but one that could be of great benefit to your business. Trello is one of my favorite tools; I use it for project management and my clients tend to like it because it’s so intuitive and easy to use. It’s very flexible and it’s an ideal tool for implementing the Kanban methodology from Toyota. However, it can also be used for customer support, and here’s how to do that.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Captcha Alternatives, WordPress, Submit Buttons, Blogging

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

The frustration of the captcha – you know what I mean. They can stop you like a brick wall, forcing you to to decipher something illegible. Try this post about alternatives to the common captcha, including the lovely honeypot – visible only to bots and not a blockade for your human users.

Who uses WordPress? Here are 20+ big brands using WordPress in 2018, including AMC, U. of Washington, BBC America and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Do your site’s Submit buttons say ‘Submit’? Here’s an interesting take on why you might want to change that for better conversions… Try something with more psychological commitment: “Contact me about a quote,” or “Request my free white paper.”

Finally… if you’re not blogging for your business, it’s still a great way to grow your site, get more pages indexed in search, establish yourself as an expert and connect with your visitors. Learn a few simple techniques for improving your marketing through more targeted blogging.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – CRO, Hosting Matters, Online Security

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Here’s a great case study showing how UX design and visual hierarchy can improve conversion rates of a web page. Simple changes can bring you noticeable results! If your site is not converting as well as it could be, a brand new year is a great time to improve. Get in touch, Red Kite can help.

Where you host matters. Why would you relegate your business website, which hopefully is helping you earn a living, to a $1.99 hosting account? Here’s the latest big outage news from EIG, who bought up dozens of small hosts like HostGator, BlueHost, HostMonster and many more. I was with HostGator for about 7 years after I started Red Kite and loved them to death. Their support fell through the floor when they sold to EIG, with many unacceptable outages and far too much downtime. I left them shortly after for Knownhost (an awesome dedicated and VPS host) and now am with WP Engine (best host I’ve ever used). When you pay nothing, that’s pretty much what you can plan on receiving in return. Do yourself and your business a favor and get a better host if you’re with one of the EIG providers listed in that article.

There’s so much Internet security noise out there, it’s hard to know what to do! Here’s a short but useful list of 8 things you can do to improve online security for your business.

Finally… we lost our 15-year-old dog 2 days after Christmas. I saw this quote yesterday and it made me smile and think of her:

the best thing about dogs is you can act like something really good just happened and they’ll instantly start celebrating too and they have no idea what the context is they’re just always ready to party no matter what

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Nonprofit SEO, Content Formatting, Twitter, Color Psych

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

You know that SEO (search engine optimization) is important if you want to attract traffic. If you’re managing a nonprofit’s website, how do you approach optimizing content? Here’s a guide to dealing with the most important SEO challenges for nonprofits.

Check out the home page of your website. What’s your first impression? Is it cluttered? Does it have a clear call-to-action (what you should do next) or is it hard to figure out where to go? Is there a huge swath of uninterrupted text, or is it broken out into shorter paragraphs, bullet lists, and blocks with headlines that are easy to scan and relevant images? Formatting matters to your users – learn how to improve time-on-page with better content formatting.

Twitter’s definitely not for everyone, or for every business, for that matter. But if you’ve decided it might fit yours and you want to jump in, you may find it pretty confusing. Here’s a guide to 10 things to do when starting out on Twitter.

Finally, a neat infographic with 40 facts about the psychology of color.

 

Why I Rarely Visit Barnes & Noble Anymore

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My husband and I both love physical bookstores. The Barnes & Noble in Fort Collins is near our house. We used to go there 3-4 times per month to browse and usually buy, either a book or two or a magazine and often some drinks. But that changed completely earlier this year.

Sometime near the beginning of 2017 we went into our store to check out the new fiction. There was no new fiction – the sections were gone. We figured they were reorganizing and didn’t think much of it, until our next visit when we again found no new fiction on the shelves.

We asked an employee and got this answer:

“We believe this is an enhanced shopping experience by integrating the New Releases into the bookcases creating a home for all of an author’s works. We think this is an improvement as discovery of titles that a customer may not have been familiar with.”

That was disappointing, as checking out the new books was typically our #1 reason for going to the bookstore. And not just for showrooming – we bought there frequently too.

Now, our B&N was not the greatest user experience. Typically in  the months leading up to this drastic change, they were short-staffed and we’d have to wait in line at the registers. Sometimes there would be 10+ people in line with one staff member manning checkout, calling over the store PA system for help between each customer and never getting any help. But removing the new release sections pretty much negated the reason for most of our visits – a big downgrade in UX.

While we were on vacation in Arizona in March, we went into a B&N there just to see, and found the same thing. We asked the manager, and got the exact same response as before – word for word.

Our membership, which we’d had for at least 10 years, came up for renewal in May. I didn’t renew. I sent an email to B&N.com explaining why, and, once again, they sent me the exact same response, word for word. They believe it’s an enhanced shopping experience not to be able to find new books in your favorite genres. They think it’s an improvement. But did they ask their customers? Was this the result of research? Or was it a decision based on saving money?

In any event, this is how our use of our local B&N has changed this year:

  • We now visit maybe once every 6-8 weeks instead of 3-4 times per month.
  • We spend about 5-10 minutes in the store instead of the typical 15-45 minutes we used to spend.
  • We typically buy only a magazine or two, and almost never buy books.
  • We don’t get drinks or snacks because we canceled our membership and don’t get discounts anymore.
  • I estimate that our spending here has decreased by about 90%.
  • We browse for our new books on Amazon now. Less enjoyable, but at least they’re easy to find.

I’m sure it was a big decision to stop displaying new books in their genre sections, for whatever reason, but I suspect this decision may come back to bite B&N.

P.S. Something interesting I found while writing this post – What B&N Doesn’t Get About Bookstores.

Weekly Links Roundup – UX, Google and Trust, Scene Generators

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Does your website delight your users? Or does it leave them with a less-than-satisfied feeling? Read this article about UX (user experience) and find out how poorly designed websites are a lot like having a cranky receptionist with a bad attitude.

Did you know that Google gets around 30 billion search queries every month? That’s staggering! And I’m sure you’ve heard the recent talk about potential biases in the major search and online news providers. Here’s an interesting recent post about how much trust people put into Google search results.

And finally… Do you use stock photos on your website? If you do, you’re certainly not alone. But did you know there are stock images that can help you show off your products? These are called (I didn’t know this) ‘scene generators.’ They can help you display your clothing, print designs, food and drink offerings, apps, identity and more. I’m actually using one on the home page of this site… View a collection of scene generator examples and see if they can benefit you, too.