Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’

A couple of weeks ago, we unveiled a new home page for the Matrix Group website. We didn’t change the overall navigation and we didn’t create a new look and feel for the site. All we did was revamp the branding area and re-arrange elements on the home page. Small changes, big impact.

Most organizations go years between redesigns. It’s a big deal to redesign a website; it takes a boatload of time, effort and money. But in between redesigns, most organizations become unhappy with their sites. We have clients come to us because they’re unhappy with everything on their site, which was last redesigned 3, 4, or 5 years ago. Does it have to be this way? I think not.

There are many, many reasons to redesign your website, including:

• Your organization’s mission, name, logo and/or brand have changed dramatically.
• Visitors complain about not being able to find what they’re looking for.
• Your products and services have changed or you’ve added new offerings and you don’t know where to put all the information.
• You are rethinking how your website fits into your company’s overall marketing strategy and want to redo all or nearly all of the content.

BUT, if you’re largely happy with the design and navigation of your site, visitors are able to find what they’re looking for, and your company branding and messaging remain the same, perhaps all you need is a website refresh. Here are some ways in which clients have refreshed their sites:

• One client changed the headers graphics throughout the site and added social media widgets.
• Another client made the entire website wider (the site had been designed for 800 x 600 pixels) and added another column on the home page for events and a featured publication.
• Yet another client revamped important landing pages and improved pages by editing the text and adding images and formatting.

If you don’t have the budget for a full redesign this year, opt for a refresh and focus on content and making calls to action more prominent.

BTW, here’s a photo of the new Matrix group home page and reasons for the refresh. I’d love to know what you think.

How about you? What’s in store for your site in 2011? Full site redesign or refresh?

• 4 Comments
• Tags: Design, Matrix Group, Web Design

Last summer, a few months before the birth of my second son, I realized that I had to do something about my house. The house felt overrun with kids’ toys, there was mail everywhere, and I couldn’t find things. At the suggestion of several mom friends, I hired a professional organizer. C. Lee Cawley of SimplifyYou came to my house, spent 3 hours with me on two occasions and changed my life. I learned that organizing your house is a lot like organizing your website. Here’s how:

Sometimes, you need a professional to do the work or help you out. Of course I could have tackled the job of organizing my house myself, but I had been trying to get my house in shape on my own without much success.  C. Lee didn’t just get the project jump started, she gave me a framework to work with.  Organizing a website is no different.  You can do the work yourself, but a good website Information Architect (IA) will help you understand user flows, and get you fired up when the task or re-organizing your website has stalled.

A good organizer gets to you know YOU. Before making recommendations, C. Lee walked the entire house with me, asked a ton of questions, and got to know me, my family, the rhythm of our life, and our priorities.  For example, C. Lee came to respect and understand that my photos, my son’s artwork, and art from our travels are some of the  most important things in my house. So she made recommendations for storing and showcasing them, rather than trying to convince me that I don’t need to keep CJ’s masterpieces from preschool.  A good IA figures out what makes each client unique, who their audiences are, their most valuable services, and their goals for a redesign.  He or she will geek out on your site’s usage reports, interview staff and outside stakeholders, create a content inventory, get a handle on all content, and strive to understand how visitors should navigate your site, for maximum impact, traffic and conversions.

Who is going to use this? C. Lee and I came up with a plan for organizing the house that worked for me, my husband and my son. For example, we created an area in the coat closet for my son that has low hooks so he can put away his backpack and coat himself. On your website, be sure to take into account your target audiences, their demographics and psychographics, what they are looking for, what they call things, and the transactions they want to make. For example, avoid insider terminology if you have a general audience and add a prominent way to resize text if you are targeting a senior audience.

A good organizer has a repertoire of tools. When it came time to find a home for all the “stuff” in my life, C. Lee gave me a multitude of options so I could select solutions that fit my budget and design aesthetic. She suggested different ways to store all of my shoes (Hey, I’m Filipino, after all!) and CJ’s trains and Legos. A good IA will explore different ways to organize your content (by topic, function or audience, for example), and present options for navigation and featured content.

Everything needs a home. C. Lee says that clutter happens when you don’t have a permanent home for everything. So mail piles up on your dining room table, kids’ games get stacked in a corner, and small electronics end up everywhere. But if everything has a home and you make a commitment to putting it back after use, clutter is less likely to happen. So too with a website. We can take the latest news item, recent publications, and the membership application form and feature them on the home page , the footer or the right rail, but we need to know where they live permanently so they can be found from anywhere in the site, not just specific pages.

Do you really need all that stuff? When I finally went through the mounds of toys in my living room, I found toys that my son never played with or hated, broken items, and games he had outgrown. Good grief! Why was  I holding on to this stuff? The short answer is I hadn’t taken the time to review, weed, edit.  When you create a content inventory of your entire site, you might be surprised at what you find. Ask yourself which content is old and dusty and needs to be archived, which content should be updated, and which content is compelling and necessary. And you should schedule a time (I recommend twice a year) to go through content on the site and determine what stays and what goes.

How about you? What have you organized lately and did anyone help you along the way?

• 3 Comments
• Tags: Information-Architecture, Web Design

Last night, Matrix Group hosted an Open House to welcome clients, partners, vendors and friends to our new office in Crystal City (okay, new as of August last year).  We used the occasion to finish decorating the office and brought in Design Cuisine (Design), a leading catering company in the DC area, to orchestrate the event.

The Open House was wonderful!  The office looked great, the food and drink were outstanding (loved the beef satay and blueberry mojitos!), turnout was great, and by all accounts, guests enjoyed themselves thoroughly.  The Open House made me realize that hosting an event, much like putting up a Web site, should be a collaboration between client and vendor.  When both parties do their part, the result is almost always success. Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Clients should take the lead when it comes to goals and direction. When Matrix Group is designing a Web site, we ask lots of questions and try to find out what their goals are and what a successful project looks like.  In the same way, Seana Hale from Design Cuisine wanted to know all about Matrix Group, how we interact with clients, and how the Open House would support our client and partner relationships.

• Clients should define the overall design aesthetic and values. When Matrix Group designers are working on a design project, we don’t try to change the character and image of an organization.  Instead, we strive to understand the client’s brand, represent it well via design and multimedia and enhance it through our work.  Design Cuisine understood that we wanted a nice event that showed off our creativity and our work, was modestly priced, and played up our brand color of purple without overdoing it.

• Let the experts take the lead but be prepared to give timely feedback.  Once we’re armed with good background information, our UX (user experience team) creates navigation, wireframes and designs.  It’s great when the client trusts our judgment, takes design direction AND lets us know if we’re on the wrong track by giving us specific and timely feedback.  We also love it when clients let us brainstorm and come up with out of the box ideas, knowing that most won’t fly but the creativity that comes out is good for the project.

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• Tags: Design, Web Design

Why do restaurant owners love Flash so much that their entire Web sites are in Flash? Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash and I make a living selling Flash movies, branding areas, yada, yada. But most Web sites should not be all Flash!

Here’s an example of an all Flash site that is annoying and borderline useless. I was scheduling lunch with a friend, who asked me to recommend a restaurant and send him the physical and Web addresses. No problem, right? Wrong.

Check out the Web site for Kora in Crystal City - http://www.korarestaurant.com/ The Web site is pretty, but if you’re trying to get an address and send it to a friend, it’s not user-friendly at all!

• It took me 5 minutes to find the address.  It’s not on the home page, nor under Hours and Directions.  It’s under Contact Us and Reservations.
• Because the site is entirely in Flash, I couldn’t copy the address and paste into the e-mail I was sending my friend.
• I also could not copy and paste the address into Google maps so that I could send my friend directions from Reston.
• Forget being able to bookmark specific pages because the URL never changes in the single Flash file for the entire site. So I couldn’t send my friend the URL of a menu page.  Aaaargh.
• Oh yeah, you can’t print Flash pages either unless print-friendly pages have been specifically created; most designers don’t bother.  So if you want to print Kora’s Hours and Directions page, you’re out of luck.

Since I’m lazy and did not want to re-type the address, I simply went to Google, typed “Kora Arlington, VA” and got a link to a map and directions from Google maps.  God bless Google.

I’m sure Kora paid good money for its beautiful, all Flash site, but I bet it’s a pain to update and it’s not very accommodating for visitors who just want to copy and paste an address.  Good grief!

How about you?  Got your own rants against an all Flash site?  Post links and comments!

• 8 Comments
• Tags: Google, marketing, Web Design

In the last twelve months, Facebook has made some major and minor changes to its interface. Each time they did this, there was hundreds of blog posts decrying or applauding the changes.  There’s even a group called “I Automatically Hate The New Facebook Home Page.”

Why do we get so upset when Facebook changes its interface?

In looking at some of the blog posts and news articles, I can understand many of the complaints. For my part, I cannot figure out the difference between News Feed and Live Feed. But I love that it’s easier to get to my Inbox and see which of my friends is currently online. I also think that Facebook generally does a great job of explaining why they have implemented specific changes.  I thought this Guide to the new Facebook Home Page was especially good.

Psychologists tell us that most humans are averse to change. With over 350M users, any change then to Facebook, no matter how small, is bound to upset some segment of the user base. And if just 1% is unhappy and vocal, that’s still 3.5M people.  If 0.1 were unhappy, that would be 350,000 people!

All of this got me thinking. Matrix Group is in the business of redesigning Web sites. We work with clients who want to redesign their sites for all kinds of reasons: name change, the navigation is not intuitive, the company’s focus has changed, yada, yada. But if Facebook users are any indication of how averse we are to change, no matter how rational, articulated or needed, there is always going to be a segment that is unhappy. This unhappy user base may be vocal about it, which I think is a good thing because then you have an opportunity to respond to the concerns.  If the user base is unhappy and silent, then you’re in trouble because you don’t know you have a problem.
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• Tags: Design, strategy, Web Design

My mom called me up one day to tell me that she loved the Google logo that day and what did I think of it? (I think the Google logo was commemorating the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street that day, btw.) At that moment, I realized that it had been weeks, maybe months, since I last visited the Google home page. Of course I use Google every day, but I use the Google search that’s built into my Web browser. Whenever I need to do a search, I click into the little box, type my keywords, then hit Enter. And voila, I get my search results.

I got to wondering if the home page, the single that we, as Web designers, spend soooooo much time wire framing and designing, has lost its luster. So I started checking our usage reports.  Sure enough, the home page of this blog gets represents between 7-10% % of the total traffic in any given month and 6-9% of total entry pages.  It makes sense given that most of the traffic comes from the blog’s RSS feed, e-mail updates, social media pages and search engines, all of which direct visitors to specific pages,  NOT the home page. The Matrix Group Web site home page gets 28% of total traffic, and that number makes sense, given that many people come to the site to learn more about the company as a result of our direct marketing efforts.

I started checking clients’ usage reports and I found that of all the sites I checked, the results were similar.  The home page gets between 17-40% of total traffic, and 15-30% of entry pages.

It turns out that lots of other people are thinking about this phenomenon and some are even declaring that the home page is dead.  Rick Stratton from Feed.us says, “(y)our homepage’s homepage is dying” because search engines, social media, RSS are linking directly to content pages.
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• Tags: Web Design

There is an ongoing discussion at Matrix Group about content and Web design.

One camp says that clients need to have all of their content prepped and ready to go before design on a Web site even begins.  The other camp says this view is not realistic, content is always behind, and clients often need the design to inspire them to update their content.

So which view is right?  I actually think that both sides are right.  But I think the question is misdirected.  The real question is: how do we make content more important, earlier in the Web site design and development process?

Here’s something every Web design and development firm knows:  Content is often the responsibility of the client, it’s often delayed, and it’s the most common reason for delayed launches. A List Apart has a whole section on their site devoted to content strategy.  I love Bronwyn Jones’ article on how good design is not possible without good writing.  And I think Erin Kissane is on to something when she discusses content templates (not design templates) as a way to help subject matter experts put their knowledge down on paper.

Here is what I have learned about content, the importance of content to design, and coaxing good content out of clients: Read the rest of this entry

• 5 Comments
• Tags: Content Strategy, Design, Web Design

Matrix Group collaborated with author and certified financial planner Kelly Campbell to launch a redesigned Web site for Fire Your Broker. The redesign features Kelly’s book Fire Your Broker, a practical guide to help individuals take over their financial futures and find the right broker.

Our work included:

• A new blog where Campbell addresses financial issues, and offers insightful tips on how to prepare for retirement and sustain financial security beyond one’s working years.
• The incorporation of other social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter to help establish a fan and follower base.
• The implementation of Expression Engine as the CMS.
• A fresh look and feel that serves  that highlights Campbell’s expertise and perspectives on the nation’s brokerage industry.

Visit Fire Your Broker

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• Tags: Blog, social networking, User-Generated Content, Web Design

Matrix Group worked with the Flight 93 Federal Advisory Commission and the Flight 93 Memorial Task Force, to design and launch the Flight 93 National Memorial Web site. The purpose of the site is to raise public awareness, funds, and commemorate the memorial, so that future generations may learn, and remember how the brave actions of few, can make a profound difference.

Matrix work included:

• A Web site that carries over design elements and functionality from the National Parks Web site to the Honor Flight 93 Web site.  Including, familiar navigation, imagery style and messaging.
• A “Give Now” form, encouraging public engagement and donations.
• Implementation of a user-friendly Content Management System (CMS)

Visit the Flight 93 National Memorial Web site

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• Tags: Design, Matrix Group, Web Design

Matrix Group collaborated with Association of Oil Pipelines (AOPL) for a Web site redesign and a MatrixMaxx Implementation.

Our work included:

• A fresh, and engaging Web site design, promoting AOPL as the expert in fuel transportation, and an environmentally aware organization.
• Implementation of a Content Management System (CMS), allowing staff to make Web site updates with no programming background.
• A color-coded, interactive map, where visitors can scroll over each state to see the location and the type of major pipelines in the US.
• Web site integration with MatrixMaxx, Association Management System (AMS). A comprehensive web-based solution, allowing AOPL to seamlessly link their Web site to their membership databases.
• Hosting and Maintenance

Visit the Association of Oil Pipelines

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• Tags: association management, Design, Web Design