Archive for June, 2012

​The Web Diet

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

The Web DietIn any diet you need to cut the fat in order to see results. After recently starting a new diet, I’ve realized that I’m no longer eating for taste, but eating for fuel. This means giving up the “fluff” that might taste great, but that also does nothing for my figure.

To get results, sometimes you just have to streamline and give the body what it needs to run at its highest efficiency. The same goes for your website. A healthy site cuts out excess. It should be the site you need, not necessarily the site you want. Remove the bulk and nourish it with stronger, leaner content, a thoughtful design, and a healthy organizational system. If you fueled with all of these “ingredients” it can thrive and achieve a look and feel that will appeal to your target audience.

Looking to get lean? Check out The Web Diet breakdown:

CONTENT:

  • Make it useful. Your content should be helpful and relevant to your audience or potential customer. Always consider your customers’ goals and what they are looking for.
  • Say it well. Make sure your site contains well written, credible, and original content. If you’re not a great copywriter, hire a professional. Keep information updated and fresh to give your audience a reason to come back.
  • Make sure it’s accurate. Use good grammar and spelling, duh!
  • Keep it short. To draw in your visitors, keep your text to a minimum. People have short attention spans—they skim and want to get to pertinent information quickly.
  • Give a call to action. Let users know what to do next—buy, contact, email, or sign-up. Help them make their next decision and get them to do what you want to them to.

DESIGN:

  • Give a good visual impression. You would dress up for an interview, so do the same with your site. First impressions are important, so put your best foot forward and create a design that is clean and visually appealing.
  • Set the tone. The visual appearance of your site will give your audience clues to the type of experience they can expect. White and clean could signal professional and credible, while colorful and textural could read unique and creative. Make sure your tone is in line with your business goals and your audience needs.
  • Design to your audience. Your look and feel should speak to your target audience. Choose photos and graphics that add visual appeal and makes sense for your viewer and your product or service.
  • Keep it simple. Your design should let viewers focus on your message. Let your message breathe with adequate white space. Your color, fonts and imagery should lead the user where you want them to go.
  • Make it readable. Make sure your text size and font is legible and has enough contrast for easy reading.

ORGANIZATION:

  • Logical Navigation. Put navigation where your audience would expect it—generally at the top of the page. Choose navigation language that is logical and makes the most sense for your viewer. Pages should have clear names so users can intuitively move through your site. Limit the number of items in your main navigation—aim for 5-7 links.
  • Create Hierarchy. Content should be arranged to make the most sense. Break information into sections or paragraphs. Group like elements and put information where users would expect to find it. Hierarchy allows viewers to easily scan and absorb your content.
  • Make it easy to find. Don’t bury key information in your site. Users should be able to get what they want within 3 clicks or less.

Diets aren’t always the easiest, but the results are worth it. Remember, don’t do something just because you can—cut out the bulk. Focus on what is most important to fuel your audience and make your site fit their needs. Relevant content, purposeful design and logical organization will keep your site thriving and keep viewers coming back.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Code Logic, Design Love, Marketizing | No Comments »


Zoom Creates Swag

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Who doesn’t love free stuff? A few months ago, we had the opportunity to represent at a swanky New York Hotelier Convention. Sure, we could have ordered some Beer Koozies and tri-color highlighters and called it a day. But we’re Zoom, and while many of us like beer, that wasn’t the vibe we were going for.

Putting our collective heads together, we talked about the kinds of things we liked to get when attending conferences, and how often the tchotchke’s never even make it out of the bag — After all, unless you’re Greg, most of us can only drink one beer at a time. At this point, we could have gone online and ordered 350 pre-printed bags, but some of us have control issues, and we wanted them to be just right. Conferences can really suck the life right out of you, so we opted for an Energy theme.

First on our list of “Must Have’s” were chocolate covered espresso beans. We found ours at K&F Coffee Roasters right here in The PDX. When I told Shirley what we were doing, she called back and offered us Hotel sized bags of their amazing Organic Bella Selva coffee as well. Next up were some kind of energy bar. After extensive research, I found Larabars, which came in a wide variety of flavors and are made from whole ingredients — Just the ticket, but I was having a hard time finding them in bulk, so I started making calls and got hooked up with Stacy J. at their corporate office, she not only found us variety packs of the smaller .78 oz size bars, she shipped them to us for free. As in, completely free! All we needed now were Emergen-C pouches for the participants to put in their water bottles, which we located at the Downtown GNC.

Once I got done “hand crafting” our bags (all 250 of ‘em), it was time to insert the goods.

Not only were these mostly fun to make, they were a huge hit at the conference — It’s always a good sign when people sneak back for more. We’ve done similar projects for a few other clients, personalizing them with monogrammed golf balls and tee’s or thumb drives and snacks, they’re a creative way to get your name remembered and stand out from the crowd of Koozies and highlighters.

A big, huge thanks again to our cross marketing partners, K & J Coffee Roasters and Larabars, you went above and beyond anything we expected, and we were already fans!

Healing Nicely From My Iron Wounds,
Mrs. Knightly

Posted in Design Love, Marketizing, ZoomCreates.com | No Comments »


Google Adwords Campaign: Don’t use your company’s name as a keyword.

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

We had recently taken over an AdWords account for a client in the hospitality industry. Due to a non-disclosure agreement, let’s call this client “Portland Zoom Hotel”. That has a nice ring to it. The client was happy that potential guests were showing up to their hotel’s web site, but the hotel did not feel confident that they were getting a return on their investment using this Google AdWords campaign. We told them that we were more than happy to take a look into their AdWords campaigns and then suggest changes that we deemed necessary for success. So we took a look. And the campaigns they had running were horrifying.

Based on an evaluation of the reports from Google Analytics and Google AdWords, we could see that the visitors to the web site from an the AdWords campaign were fairly satisfied with the site overall. They viewed multiple pages, spent a good amount of time on the site, and seemed to have a good conversion rate.

Of course, that wasn’t the horrifying part. What was shocking, was that out of the 47,000 paid visits that the AdWords campaign brought to the hotel’s web site, 38,000 of them used variables of the search term “Portland Zoom Hotel.” This means that searchers looking for the Portland Zoom Hotel which used its name as a search term had been clicking on the paid advertisements instead of the organic result that would show up naturally. The Portland Zoom Hotel paid $22,000 over a 20 month period for visitors who had every intention of going directly to their web site—paid advertisement or not. It would be like a business paying a person to stand at the entrance directing customers who are already on their way in.

Thanks guy, I know.

Advertising is about making consumers aware that your business exists and that it provides a service that they need or desire. Traditional advertising such as television, radio and newspaper is a kind of shotgun blast form of advertising. It can reach many people in many types of backgrounds, as it holds no bias. It doesn’t care if a person has interest or not, it will try to sell to everyone. Digital marketing, like Google AdWords, is a completely different animal. With Google AdWords, you are advertising to consumers who have definitive interest in your product or service.

Off the top of your head, can you name the hotel in Kona Hawaii on Palani Road? No? No you can’t. If your Aunt lived in Kona Hawaii on Palani Road, chances are that you do not know that the wonderful Kona Seaside Hotel is there. If you wanted a hotel in Kona on Palani Road, you would probably use the search term “Hotel in Kona on Palani Road” not “Kona Seaside Hotel” because you didn’t know that it was there to begin with.

I can see my Aunt’s house from here.

The same thing for the poor Portland Zoom Hotel. For someone who has never been to Portland and is interested in finding a hotel downtown, they may use a search term such as “hotel in downtown Portland.” If a person knew nothing about Portland, they would never use the search term “Portland Zoom Hotel” because they have no idea that it is there. Only searchers who know about the hotel would use that term. More often than not, using a business name when searching in a search engine like Google, will bring that same business’ web site to the top of the Google search engine results page. There is no reason to pay for it.

To spend your advertising budget wisely, bid on keywords that are descriptive to your business. Not the name of your business. In the case of the Portland Zoom Hotel, we told them to choose keywords that relate to their hotel itself ; such as, “hotel in Portland” or “hotel for families.” These keywords drove qualified consumers to the site that may have never previously heard about the Portland Zoom Hotel.

Just in case you don’t believe me, try this: If you have a Google Adwords account, go to the Google Adwords traffic estimator.  In one line enter the description of your business, then on the next line underneath it, enter in the name of your business. Click “get estimate”.  Enter $100 for the Max CPC and $1000 for the daily budget, why not, you’re rich right? If the daily impressions are more for your business than the description of your business is, disregard what I’ve said in the last seven paragraphs and put some money in your budget for your name brand. In all honesty, It probably won’t be more. In fact there are very few times it is. The term “Coca-Cola” is searched nearly 10,000 time a day in America; whereas the term “soft drink” is searched for a mere 8 times. This is rare, not all of us are Coca-Cola

“Zoom Creates” doesn’t even have any daily impressions (yet), compared to “creative agency” which has a lot. Well looky there… the number of the beast. Some say the industry is a devilish lot.

This is for you Greg.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Marketizing | 6 Comments »


Automotive Design Language

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

Since I was a kid, I have always been obsessed with cars. Not necessarily playing with them, but just looking at them and watching them evolve over time. It might have started with playing a game called Slug Bug where my brother and I would punch each other in the arm whenever we saw a VW Beetle. We would constantly scan the traffic, looking for an excuse to punch one another other (not that we really needed one but it seemed to justify the violence somehow).

I really liked punching my brother. Catching him off guard, punching him when he wasn’t expecting it was one of my favorite things to do. In order to do this, I needed a keen eye to detect and identify the Beetle from great distances or even at night. The Beetle is very distinctive with its large round headlights, domed roof and lack of trunk. As I got older, I stopped looking for excuses to punch my brother and just hit him whenever I wanted to but I never stopped trying to identify cars. I still do it to this day. Everyday on my drive home from work I try to identify cars in my peripheral vision and then look over to see if I am right.

Some cars are easy to identify just because of their iconic shape or design elements like the Porsche 911, Citroën DS, DMC DeLorean and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

But many cars look the same with the generic features like 4 doors, 4 wheels, trunk, hood, color, etc..

There are subtle differences in all cars. As you pay more attention, you begin to recognize their different design elements. Some of these design elements, I have discovered, have names. Here are some general and specific design elements to help in vehicle identification:

The Porsche 911(930) Whale Tail. No other car has it.

 

Since 2003, BMWs Angel Eyes headlights have been one of their most recognizable features. There are halo rings around each of the headlight lenses.

 

Jeeps almost always have a vertical seven slot grill.

 

The Hofmeister Kink is an automobile design named after former BMW director of design, Wilhelm Hofmeister first featured on a 1961 BMW 1500. Rather than having the rear side window extend all the way down, it angles back toward the front of the car.

The Hofmeister Kink is not specific to BMWs, though. Many other car manufacturers have adopted this element in order to make their cars seem more luxurious? Only two examples below show the kink. See the difference?

 

The Saab Hockey Stick are features seen on all Saab automobiles. The Hockey Stick is a C-pillar curve from the base of the rear passenger window that resembles the shape of an ice hockey stick.

 

All new Kias now incorporate the Tiger Nose grill.

 

Hyundai’s new design language is called Fluidic Sculpture, a style that can be seen as as an almost liquid look.

 

There are many other design elements that can help you identify a car like tail fins or brake light shapes or bumpers, etc. These are just a few that I have recognized or learned about lately.

Posted in Design Love, Etc. | 2 Comments »