by 247nywebdesign | Aug 26, 2020
Product tours also known as product walkthroughs, allow us to introduce visitors to a new product and help them find what they want. We do this with the help of smart UI and guide users to meaningful actions that lets them understand our product and ultimately buy it. Doing so not only improves product activation, but also increases adoption, and retention rates.
That said, a poorly executed product tour actually disappoints new users. Instead of letting them understand your products, it prevents them from discovering its core value. As a result, they abandon your product too soon.
During a product tour, instead of explaining users every feature, the focus should always be on the product’s value and user goals. In this article, we will discuss why should incorporate product tours in your marketing strategy to gain the best conversions.
Why Use a Product Tour?
Every software and tool has a learning curve users have to overcome to experience its value. This is why it’s important for product owners to get users over that learning curve and help them get most out of their product as quickly and efficiently as possible. Products tours are excellent to launch typically complex products like software solutions into the market.
Here are five reasons to use product tours in your strategy.
Compel Users to Take Meaningful Actions
Product tours allow your users to explore your product in-depth through your help and supervision. As a result, instead of asking them to understand your app on their own, product tours allow you to influence their behavior.
You can guide them through every step and explain why a particular step is important. Users develop a deep understanding of your product and they are compelled to take meaningful actions.
Are Simple to Build and Experiment with
Product tours make your product easy to roll out and help you iterate your customers experience with your tool. You don’t need to make changes within your app, and you can immediately start to build a comprehensive product tour. At the same time, you can experiment with onboarding and discover new ways that resonate with your customers.
Add Value
No one wants to know about a product unless it promises to offer something of value to him or her. A product tour does just that. It becomes an agent for showcasing your product’s true value to a targeted audience.
Most advertisements limit their approach of marketing to a set of certain features, disregarding what their audience values the most. Product tours, on the other hand, allow you to focus on core values that excite your customers the most. By offering your users exactly what they want, you provide value to them and gain their trust.
Push Users towards Conversion
Product tours not only showcase the value your product provides, but they offer a personal experience through the lens of the customers. Because they can practically see how they can use certain features in their life, it helps them contextualize the product. As a result, a product tour can push customers to conversion more effectively.
Product tours are an excellent way to promote your solutions in a targeted manner. To learn about how to create an effective product tour, please follow my blog.
by 247nywebdesign | Aug 25, 2020
Nowadays, we get most of our information through reading. Therefore, it only makes sense to pay attention to words so people can understand it much more effectively. Although typography has many aspects, letter spacing is something that plays a major role in a text’s readability.
Letter-spacing involves adding or removing space between letters. While it’s easy to confuse with kerning, there is a major difference. Kerning is responsible for the space between two individual letters, whereas letter spacing affects the entire line of text.
Where optimizing kerning is out of the question for a web designer, line spacing is something we can manage through CSS. In this article, we will discuss tips to optimize line spacing for better design.
Letter-Spacing Capital Letters
Capital letters are used mostly at the beginning of proper nouns, sentences, or with a combination of lowercase letters. For this reason, when these letters are besides each other, their spacing is too constricted. To attain better readability, it’s better to increase this space, regardless of font sizes.
Letter-Spacing Headlines
Most headline fonts are carefully designed to make them readable. However, as we increase the size of these headlines the space between letters enlarges exponentially and they often look unbalanced. We can fix these issues by modifying the letter-spacing value.
If you are uncertain about how you should modify change line spacing, you can always use default values provided by Apple and Material Design as a reference for certain typefaces. Doing so can save you a lot of time.
Letter-Spacing Body Text
There’s a common perception among designers that modifying the letter spacing of lowercase letters is a sin. However, this doesn’t apply to all typefaces. This is why it’s best to experiment with different typefaces and use a letter-spacing value that makes your body text readable. Here are some things you can use to optimize design for body text.
Line-Height
When you have a line-height more than 120%, using negative letter-spacing will make the letter spacing appear unbalanced. To make it seem balanced and optimized, it’s best to either increase it slightly or keep it at 0%.
Color Contrast
Contrast is something that always catches our eyes. This is why, it’s better to leverage contrast to make text readable.
You can use white text on a dark background, but that can seem overexposed and make letters feel tight. Instead you can increase the letter-spacing a small amount.
Use General Values
For body text use these guidelines.
- Body 1 — 16px — 0.5%
- Body 2 — 14px — 0.25%
by 247nywebdesign | Aug 24, 2020
Change in web design is quick and brutal. Those not quick on their feet or unwilling to adapt cannot, find it difficult to survive in the market. Unsurprisingly, web designers are always pushed to seek new skills, experiment with new tools and technologies, and keep on hustling.
However, the nightmare of constant change can stop people from following defined path, as it’s easy to wander away from what you originally planned. Aspiring web designers wring at the idea of starting things over when you have just started to settle. In this article, I will outline five important tips you should remember to overcome chaotic change as a web designer.
Remember to Follow Change through Necessity
Before you start pursuing new skills and experimenting with different tools, it’s important to see if you really need to do that in the first place. Are you learning new languages, tinkering with your client list or trying out different approaches just because you feel that way, is there any method to your madness?
Although it’s important to be open to change, investing time money, and effort is only good when following change will be the best for you in the long term. Instead of pursuing every new change, you should research how much a certain trend or change affects your work and your long-term plans.
Build Your Foundation
New designers often have gaps in training and education since there is no clear path for young web designers to follow. They master a wide pool of web technologies. but don’t learn how to market their skills and manage projects effectively.
To overcome change, you first need to develop a complete set of hard skills relevant to your domain. You can become a full stack develop, mean stack developer, or any other learning path that matches your interests.
However, most importantly, you must hone your non-design skills to succeed in the freelance market. In other words, you must brush up financial management, project management, planning & scheduling, as well as communication & collaboration skills.
Learn Evergreen Skills
The problem with technology is that it never stays static. It constantly evolves and to stay relevant, you must constantly evolve, as well. This is why you should research new technologies thoroughly and learn technologies that are here to stay.
Learning a set of evergreen skills is what you need to gain a prosperous career, no matter how the design landscape changes. This means you should learn more things than an average web designer’s skill set , so you can stand out from the crowd.
Always Be Ready
Just like technology, the web is constantly evolving. It’s your responsibility to learn as a web designer and hone your skills whenever you can. You should always be ready for change. One way to do that is to watch out for Google’s mobile-first indexing constantly.
Google announces before it makes any major changes in the industry. Therefore, by following them you can identify things you must learn to get ahead of others.
Adapting to change can be hard, but by being aware of the market and following a comprehensive learning path, you can successfully overcome all challenges you face.
by 247nywebdesign | Aug 19, 2020
CTA buttons play a central role in directing your website traffic towards your products and services. Any action that enables the customer to interact with your directly is inadvertently linked to a CTA button.
Although effective CTA buttons are vital to a website’s conversion rate, many website owners don’t pay attention to how they can optimize them. Today, we will guide you through on how you can reinvent your CTA buttons to achieve better conversions.
Color
The proper use of color is one of the most important instruments in web design. A bad color palette can ruin a great design and turn visitors away instead of bring them to you. A good color combination makes the text of your CTA button more noticeable.
You can use it to improve a design’s usability, convey the overall mood of your website, reflects the overall message of the brand. Experts recommend using a color scheme and combination that evokes an emotion that connects with your brand.
Contrasting CTA Text and Button
While choosing an appropriate color scheme is essential for your CTA button’s success, enticing colors that don’t contrast well with each other can break your conversions. Experts recommend using contrasting tones to highlight important messages in text, headlines, and CTA buttons. Doing so makes your message readable and thus, more effective.
The color of your button and its enclosed text needs to contrast with each other background. You can, for instance, use a darker font on a lighter button, or the vice versa. Similarly, it’s best to highlight important design elements such as the CTA button in a color different from the rest of the website.
CTA Button Shape
Most website owners use rectangular buttons as their CTA buttons. Interestingly enough, this shape is the best way to represent your CTA button, headlines, and other important elements. When used effectively, it can raise your reader’s emotions, because shapes are psychological drivers for us humans.
Many marketers leverage rectangular elements as they represent traditionalism, balance, and reliability. Similarly, circular elements are considered as wholesome, friendly, and soft, so they have a calming effect on users.
However, not everyone goes by these beliefs and many users prefer fancier buttons shapes. As long as your targeted audience likes to unconventional shapes for buttons, using them in your design is fine. Although this is a judgment call for designers, you should always strive for a shape that looks clickable.
CTA Button Size
There’s a perception amongst some website owners that bigger CTA buttons are always better, because they tend to get more attention than smaller buttons. However, not all attention is good attention, because buttons can get more attention for being especially weird.
Oversized buttons can appear too “aggressive” for users and can actually have the opposite effect on user experience. Responsiveness is also something worth considering. You should always create a button that adjusts to smaller screens and balances out with the overall design.
Moreover, you can leverage white space more effectively with smaller CTAs buttons. These buttons make your text more noticeable and draw more attention to your messaging. Even if you’re making responsive design, leveraging whitespace works well as it isolates the CTA button more effectively.
CTA buttons seem simple from a common user’s perspective, but it takes a lot of directed effort to create effective CTA buttons. To learn more about essential web design tips, feel free to follow my blog.
by 247nywebdesign | Aug 17, 2020
Designing a good landing page isn’t rocket science, but requires significant effort. A good landing page must give your customers what they want, something that goes beyond just “looking good”.
Learning how to create a good landing page can transform your website’s conversion rate and boost your sales. In this article, we will demystify how to create a landing page that converts by using X simple tips.
What Is a Landing Page?
The purpose of a landing page is to increase conversion rates and help you achieve your marketing or business growth goals. Businesses have found that ad-targeted landing pages can achieve 115% more conversion compared to generic web pages.
Your landing page can be anything from a standalone page dedicated to a specific campaign, sale, or product to your website’s homepage, or other pages in your industry. People often get confused about how landing pages generally differ from other pages that visitors find through a search engine.
In most cases, it depends on how people find your page and the purpose of your page. Visitors find homepages from someone they know or through social media, whereas, they discover landing pages through paid ads or organically through high-ranking search results and keywords.
4 Tips to Create Landing Pages That Convert
Matching Messaging to Ads/Keywords
Website owners either link landing pages to paid ads or tie them to specific keywords. This is why visitors are expecting to find what they want on your page.
Unless the messaging of your landing page matches the relevant ad or keyword, it can easily put off them from your website. The design of the web page must highlight the messaging of your landing page to get the most out of it.
Utilizing “Above the Fold”
In web marketing, “above the fold” is the page visible without scrolling. Just like the upper half of a newspaper’s front page, the content displayed in this section gets the visitor’s attention instantly. This is why it’s essential to place a targeted call to action (CTA) here.
There are many ways to utilize this section effectively. You can include a unique sales proposition, a convincing CTA, or an engaging headline. Because this section is highly visible, it automatically prompts visitors to follow through with their actions, increasing your website’s conversion, as a result.
Targeted SEO
Search engine optimization is essential for your website’s performance. However, for landing pages, targeted SEO is the key to conversion. Instead of using multiple keywords on a single landing page, it’s prudent to use one specific, targeted keyword for your page.
Minimal Space for Visual Cues and Effects
Showing products in action is a great way to make visitors feel like customers. This is why it’s a great idea to include demo videos, photographs, visuals, and even step-by-step animations to your landing page.
The human brain understands visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Adding these visual cues to your landing page helps visitors contextualize the product or service in their own setting. As these customers feel more connected to the product, they are more likely to buy it.
Landing pages are the ideal tools for targeted marketing. By following all landing page best practices, you can achieve better conversion for your website and boost your sales.
