Ben's New Year 2010 Newsletter

In web design, Simple Design has become part of the consciousness of the profession.

While "Keep it Simple, Stupid" and "Content is King" were touchstones from day one, I'd say the web industry has finally fully accepted that simple, direct communication beats fancy design, and that we must strive to deliver what our web site visitors want, not what we personally prefer.

Usability is now more mainstream and accessible, User-Centered Design has become part of many people's design processes, and we've also seen SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing - pay-per-click etc.) become dedicated professional disciplines.

Web2.0 has dominated the second half of the decade. This has many faces, but primarily it's about web-based apps that share information between users, and which get better the more people use them. We've seen some amazing new technologies become available, many of those provided free by Google (the success story of the Noughties), like Analytics, Maps, GMail, etc..

On the production side, we've seen the emergence of Semantic HTML, AJAX, and jQuery (which I think is the new name for DHTML ;-).

In development, MySQL, the free relational database, is now part of the mainstream, as are Ubuntu Linux, and PHP. We've also seen the creation of Ruby on Rails, web services, and mashups, opening up a whole new world of rapid development.

Friends, creativity has never had so much to play with!

Looking Ahead

Let's look ahead at the next few years. What do the 2010's hold in store for web designers?

I believe that the discipline of web design will need to keep broad, in order to deliver results. Now, you have to appreciate SEO, you have to know how to read your Analytics, and you have to work constantly to spot weak points in your conversion funnel and experiment to fix them.

What are the most critical skills for web designers in the 2010's?

Firstly, if you're not designing with SEO in mind, you're already well off the pace. There are two things a web site needs in order to succeed. The first is Traffic. If your site isn't getting seen by the right number of the right people, it can't succeed, no matter how great it might be.

The other major factor, which is on everybody's lips right now, is Conversion. However much traffic you get, your site needs to convert those visitors to take some action. The proportion of visitors who successfully complete the action your site wants them to take is your Conversion Rate, and Conversion Rate Optimisation is the hottest topic in web design today.

For good reason too! Doubling your conversion rate is often an awful lot easier than doubling your traffic - for the same results. And the benefits are pretty permanent. Fix your funnel, then you can throw more traffic at your site in confidence, and watch the numbers prove your efforts worthy.

What part will graphic design play in web design? Certainly it will have less prominence than it has had for the last 15 years. It will always be important, but it's a lot less important than a great site structure, and particularly writing. I wrote this year that writing is the #1 key skill for a web designer, and I think that will always be the case.

How You Can Optimise Your Site Today

That's exactly what my new book is going to teach - how to make your existing web site really fire on all cylinders.

The trick is knowing what makes the difference, and finding that out is the journey my team has been on for over a year now.

To prove it, I'm going to tell you a story, and then I'll make you an offer.

We're running a number of experiements on clients' sites to help us better understand what an existing site owner/designer can do today to improve conversion rate.

One of our first clients sells a physical product online, mainly driven by PPC traffic. They were finding that 2% of visitors took the step of committing to buy the product.

They paid us £995 (approx. USD 1615) to optimise their landing page. We analysed the site according to our working checklist of optimisation techniques, and implemented a couple of minor changes. One was to amend the main image to show the product in use, and the other was to make the call to action much clearer and bolder.

In this case, we did not even edit the page's text. Just a couple of changes boosted the conversion rate from 2% to 6.7% - an instant 235% improvement!

Because of that, this client could see a return on their investment in just five days, and are now enjoying a massive increase in profits. I have to say, we're delighted!

(What's more - we haven't even finished yet. There are still things we'd like to try, and improvements that can be made. We will post a full case study online when we're done.)

And that's just one experiment…

• On another site, we doubled the number of people who clicked on a callout ad with some simple copy & graphics changes.
• On another recent test, we're seeing a 56% increase just from changing a single button and introductory paragraph copy.
• On a different client's site, we've already improved clickthrough rates by 56.7% in one test, and a further 55.6% on the second test (a 143% improvement already).

Would you like to see results like these on yours, or your clients', web sites?

I Want to Optimise Your Site!

We have discovered a lot from our first batch of experiments - much of which has surprised us - and these discoveries have generated many more questions.

In order to practice and prove our discoveries, we're looking for more optimisation subjects.

We're getting a huge buzz out of being able to boost people's business in this way, and we'd be delighted to

If your site would benefit from a rapid increase like the one I've mentioned, and you get enough traffic (hundreds of visitors daily), I'd love to hear from you.

Here are full details of the process, and remember there's just a single one-off fee to be part of the project.

Please email me direct at optimise@scratchmedia.co.uk, and we'll get you set up.

Best wishes for 2010!

Ben