Welcome! This is the new home for the ReachCustomersOnline.com weblog. This weblog supports past readers plus a new audience of Red Wrangler subscribers. Thank you for visiting and reading today. Let me know if there is anything you need to help improve your internet marketing. — Tim Slavin, Founder & Chief Wrangler
"When we learn to read and write, the process is vitally dependent on letterforms--learning to distinguish one from another, learning their sounds and their shapes--but the act of "appreciating" the diverse forms is practical, rather than aesthetic. Thus, at some point in the process of learning to read and write, the medium fades into the background, and the message becomes the focus of our attention. Or, put another way, we are taught to pay attention to what is being said in print, but not how it's being said."
I'd also add that some people are attuned to letterforms while many are not. From MyFonts.com, an interview with prolific typographer Nick Curtis. Read his biography and see his fonts here. He also has a huge catalog of free fonts listed at FontFreak, including a wonderful script font, Quiggly Wiggly which is based on type he found on a toothpick wrapper. And I think his website is Nick's Fonts, although in a very contrarian way the site refuses to have any about us or contact information to make sure. But the site does have an excellent list of typography links worth checking out.
This is a fun and enlightening interview with lots of examples and drafts to pick over. And it's a nice life to imagine, especially the ability to spend time researching old type at places like the Smithsonian.
"I recently discovered some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache. When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com." Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:
Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.
Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)
From the Official GMail Blog. I used to create custom email addresses when signing up for email newsletters and other things online to track misuse, until I had to reconfigure my mail to avoid spammers using the same capability to relay spam. So here's another way to use custom email addresses to track misuse, this time with your Google Mail account, which is free and easy to use. Indeed, with Google Docs and a few other of their free tools, you could do most of your computing with a web browser. When Photoshop and Ilustrator are put online, that definitely will be true.
"Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the speed with which users can scan the menu and select their preferred options."
From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox. This should be common sense but you still see right aligned forms (so the form labels are next to the input fields) and navigation links.
"I'll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what's the first thing that greets you? A form.
We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step."
This is a classic debate within web design: how do you make forms as short as possible? Even to the point, as this article argues, that forms disappear.
With forms, what is the minimum data set needed to complete the job the form does? With a Contact Us form, you want enough data to follow up, at the minimum, but you also don't want to waste time calling or emailing tirekickers who will never buy. And you don't want qualified prospects to click away because they're intimidated by too many questions on a form. Where do you strike a balance with these conflicting interests?
A Contact Us form ideally should have at least one or two elements that help pre-qualify the lead. A real estate site might ask if the person is a homeowner (or renter) and when they plan to buy (possible responses might be "Just looking, within 3 months, within 6 months, within a year").
However, the temptation is to dump everything on a form, to make the user answer all sorts of questions. The best approach, in this case, is to design the form so pre-qualify questions are visually separate from the key information needed. Marketing questions might be in their own form CSS fieldset with a friendly headline and short explanatory text. Users can then skip down the form to find the Submit button if they want to do so.
I personally don't think forms should disappear. I do think every element on a form has to have ironclad reasons to be on the form. Otherwise, you should never burden the user. It also helps to put a short note near the Submit button that says, in effect, "We will never sell, trade, or otherwise share your information without your permission" with perhaps a link to your privacy policy. Every form also should have a confirmation page and an automatic email response to let the user know their data was received. Both should include the full list of contact information in the event the user wants to contact you more quickly.
Finally, forms really lend themselves to analysis over time. You should keep track to see if a short version of a Contact Us form results in more leads or if a slightly longer form results in more qualified leads. What you or your client decide works best should be based on actual experience.
"Here's an interesting video showing how a paper prototype usability test helped the usability team at Corel find flaws in a preliminary design of a website creation product."
While I'm a sucker for live and video tape of usability testing, this one may be self-indulgent given my work creating Red Wrangler. Corel seems locked in the classic paradigms of client side software. And ways of thinking about web page and web site publishing. These paradigms don't work, unfortunately.
One solution is what we've done with Red Wrangler, breaking out the web site publishing problems into three parts: content, templates, and navigation links. The latter is sometimes dynamic, sometimes hard-coded in the templates. Typically templates are created by people who know HTML and CSS and we provide support to make it all work easily. Non-technical people typically work only with content using the WYSIWYG editor. When you do create a page, you link to that page either by updating the navigation links and/or linking from other pages. It's not a perfect solution but it avoids the confusion you see in this video.
The only solution I've seen work that is similar to Corel's is Google's publishing product. You can drag and drop pages and the functionality is fairly intuitive. I believe, for example, that Google's product updates any navigation links dynamically based on how you order pages.
However, like Corel, Google's product thinks of web site and web page publishing as a silo. In fact, publishing web sites is part of a larger process. Red Wrangler is unique, so far, because we make it easy to corral in one place all the other related internet marketing activities that go with publishing a web site or a web page. For example, most business sites have a Contact Us page that generates leads and those leads must be gathered for follow-up and marketing with direct mail and email.
In any event, if you're interested in watching paper prototyping, this is an interesting video.
Andy Budd has a long list of well-designed sites that use CSS for layout. It's a great resource if you're looking for creative inspiration for a web design or redesign. It's also a great resource if you want to study link labels, what words people most often use for a link, what words are most effective, as well as how people organize information on types of websites, for example, web sites for web designers.
Red Wrangler helps web professionals manage clients and workflow. They can provide their clients with easy to use tools to publish web pages, manage leads, and more, all in one place online. This blog and the resources pages are part of the Red Wrangler service.
"Red Wrangler puts everything in one place. I can use my own web address to find my shopping cart, leads, affiliate site, and all the rest. It's also much easier to tweak our site for search engines. Best of all, I did not have to change hosting or web design."
Great tools are not enough for web designers and their clients. Unlike other tools, Red Wrangler includes how-to information about all aspects of internet marketing. Some is embedded in the application. Some is in the form of a blog and a list of carefully vetted resources. (The blog has been active since late 2002, at ReachCustomersOnline.com, and has ranked highly with Google on some internet marketing topics, for example, how to code HTML email newsletters.)
