Mind on Marketing

You’ve done a great job of driving people to your site using Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, etc. Now what? Once they get there, you’ve only got a few seconds before they decide to stay or move on. With hundreds of millions of sites, your users have a lot of options, and limited time. If they can’t [...]

When someone arrives at your web site, make sure they know what your site is about. These usability considerations are a key part of how effectively your site communicates what your business does. Here are some of the main things that should be on your home page and carried out in design and content throughout [...]

Came across a posting in Jakob Nielsen’s usability site, useit.com, the authorititave source on web site usability. Titled 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities, the piece provides a nice framework for planning your site’s makeover. He comments that his ideas are not the “latest over-hyped stories the trade press loves to cover,” but instead, give users what [...]

These are my top ten usability tips, based on the work I do with clients and the problems I see most often:
1. Be clear on your business and marketing plans. If your business is undergoing an identity crisis, wait until you’ve resolved it.
2. Know your audience and focus on them, not you. Talk to your customers and [...]

This morning at a business networking breakfast, I spoke with a real estate agent who was thinking about how to make her three web sites different from and better than the gazillion other realtor sites out there. “What do I do? Where do I begin?” she said. These are the same questions that were on [...]

This morning I taught a workshop, co-leading with David Robinson at Birch Studio, on creating more compelling web sites. David and I both felt very strongly that we wanted to have participants focus on their business and marketing goals first. We’ve both found this to be a big hurdle that we have to help clients [...]