Over time, the team at SmallBox has developed their own content management system that’s customized to the needs of each client they bring on. The software is agile and does have a modular design that allows for adding on new features and functionality over time. SmallBox has continued to develop features that have really assisted their clients, including an FAQ module.

While many agencies continue to try to figure out a one-size-fits-all approach, SmallBox is a unique agency that believes that each customer is independent, requiring a different solution and a different marketing strategy. In case you’re wondering, SmallBox doesn’t utilize its CMS to lock a company down, either. Clients are free to leave with the solution for their own use.

As Google discovers your site and you links get discovered that point to your content, Google begins to develop its own interpretation of your site hierarchy.

You may have a single post that is optimized well for specific keywords, and has a ton of links to it, actually driving the importance of pages in your site in reverse with Google. “Link juice” may flow from a blog post to a category, from a category to a home page rather than vice versa.

Of course, in reality, neither hierarchy matters as much as the path that is utilized by your web visitor.

Every single page is a home page and you should both encourage and prepare that they will be the entry page into your site and that you have an effective path for engagement – either through a contact form or by developing calls-to-action to landing pages.

It’s difficult to understand that just because you think that you’ve designed a hierarchy that matters and that focuses attention where you’d like it to be, doesn’t mean that’s how your site is discovered and actually utilized! Design accordingly!

Using WordPress as a content management system, we can design, professional looking, simple to use websites for our small business clients.  The ever growing list of plugins has allowed us to create more and more robust sites, with features comparable to custom-designed sites available at significantly higher price points.  - So to put it mildly, I am a WordPress Fan.

With each update, there are more and more features which make my job easier and simplify the lives of our clients.   And now, WordPress 3.0 is scheduled for release on Monday.    How much better will this new version be?   The early reports from the Beta testers hints at some terrific new features:

• Custom Post Types: In the old version you could create posts and pages, now you can create additional formats for specific types of information, testimonials, FAQ’s, customer or employee profiles, the list of possiblities is as long as the types of companies who might use it.
• Author Posts: On multi author blogs like this one, each author can have their own “style” .  While site owners should still control over all look and feel to maintain brand integrity, this should allow for a bit more personality to come through.   I am really excited about this particular feature for the roundpeg blog as each member of my team begins to write more and more content.
• Menu Management: In the older version, ordering pages and sub pages had to be managed within each post.  Adding a page was easy, but getting it into the correct spot on the navigation could be a pain, especially if you had multiple pages.  Having one main
• Sidebar Footer Widgets: We frequently use Studio press themes because of this feature which allows us to create content rich  footers which appear on each page.  I am excited to see this included into 3.0 as a standard.
• Merging Single User and MultiUser: While my clients won’t care, this is going to be a huge improvement for us, as we add more and more sites.  Switching to a MU format will allow us to update plugins and content once, not over and over again!

There are so many other exciting features with this upgrade!  I can’t wait to try them all.  Would love to know what you like best as you begin to work with the newest version.

At Tuitive we spend a good deal of time preparing other people?s photography for the web, so here are some quick pointers we?ve picked up along the way.

Please note: the technical instructions below refer to Adobe Photoshop CS4. There are other programs that can perform the same functionality, so if you don?t have access to Photoshop please check the help documentation for your image editing program to see if you can perform these techniques.

Resizing & Sharpening

Oftentimes preparing a photo for your website or blog requires you to make it smaller, especially if it is coming from a multi-megapixel digital camera. It?s important to know that a reduction in size implies a reduction in detail, as Photoshop is ?mushing? together neighboring pixels in order to fit the image to its new dimensions; this gives the photo a blurry look.

In order to ?fake? the detail you have lost you should apply the Unsharp Mask filter (Filter > Unsharp Mask). Nevermind the counter-intuitive name — the Unsharp Mask actually sharpens!

You can notice how much clearer and pronounced the details are in Figure 2 below.

The controls on the Unsharp Mask dialog box may look daunting, but the good news on preparing photos for the web is you won?t have to mess with them very much. I find an Amount of 50%, a Radius of .5, and a Threshold of 0 works almost all of the time.

Crop Images Contextually

In some scenarios, you might want to create a series of thumbnails that link to a larger version of an image. Common scenarios for this are photo galleries or news headlines that have a thumbnail version of a larger photograph.

When reducing an image to thumbnail size, try to crop the image to its essential elements before resizing. This allows users to grasp the content and meaning of the image even at small sizes.

Figure 1 is an image that has been directly scaled to its thumbnail dimensions, but Figure 2 has been cropped to the most important elements of the photo. This allows users to quickly understand what the image is trying to communicate and encourages them to click for more information.

Vibrance & Saturation

An image’s saturation is its intensity of colors. On under-saturated images, skin tones look sickly and skies look grey and dull. To add some life to your images, Photoshop CS4 has a filter I recommend called Vibrance.

If you want to quickly bring some life to your dull photography try the following:

1. Add a new adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Vibrance)

   

2. Increasing the Vibrance slider (Figure 2) within the Adjustments panel will intensify color while protecting skin tones (preventing them from looking too orange). The Saturation slider will have a similar effect, but will change the entire image, including skin tones.

Conclusion

These tips are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the rich and powerful features Photoshop offers for correcting and optimizing photography. Please give a note in the comments if there are any other techniques you would like to see explained.

The answer was tiny, but had a huge impact… adding a tiny new image to the link in the navigation menu. (click through to the post to see it in action). I ran with the link for several days by itself and got zero traffic. I added the image and now 8.5% of outbound traffic is going through that link!

Rather than actually embed the image in the HTML, I utilized CSS so that I could use it on other new features in the future. The CSS looks like this:

span.new {
background: url(/mytheme/new.png) no-repeat top right;
padding: 0px 18px 0px 0px;
}


The background anchors the image to the right top of the text and stops it from repeating. The padding pushes out the span 18 pixels past the text so that your image is in clear view. To embed it in the page is now easy, I just use a span tag around my text:
<span class="new">Reviews</span>

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to point your readers in a new direction!

If you believe a great product or great content can overcome poor design, you’re mistaken. The return on investment on great designs has been proven over and over. It’s absolutely worth the time and expense.

That said… great design doesn’t have to cost you that much, though. Modern web content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Django, Joomla, Magento (for commerce), Expression Engine, etc. all have extensive theming engines. There are also many web design frameworks, like YUI Grids CSS, for sites made from scratch.

The advantage of utilizing these systems is that you can save a lot of your web and graphic designer’s time. Professional web designs can cost $2,500 to $10,000 (or more depending on the portfolio and references of the agency). A lot of that time may be spent on developing the page layout and CSS.

Rather than paying for layouts and CSS, why not choose from thousands of themes already constructed and simply have your graphic artist work on the graphical design? Breaking up a great design built in Photoshop or Illustrator and applying it to an existing theme takes a fraction of the time than designing all from scratch.

An additional advantage of using this approach is that the layout can impact search engine optimization as well as usability – something that theme developers are typically cautious of before they publish and sell themes online. Since many of my readers are WordPress users, one of the sites I love for this is WooThemes. For Joomla, the RocketThemes has a fantastic selection.

One additional piece of advice, when you subscribe or purchase these themes – be sure to get the developer license. The developer license on WooThemes is about twice the cost (still only starting at $150!). This provides you with the actual Photoshop file to provide your graphic artist to design with!

The magazine always has inspiring designs and comes with some great software, tutorials and samples on an embedded CD.

For those of us that live across the pond, though, it’s not cheap – I was paying about $16 a magazine (worth it, though!). I find myself picking it up month after month. This month I finally got smart and ordered an annual subscription of the magazine.

I’d like to share the magazine with you folks as well, so each month I’m going to put a code in my RSS feed and email that you can enter in an online form. Each month I will buy a subscription for one of my readers. You must live somewhere the subscription can be delivered – currently the UK, the US and Canada. For US readers, that’s a $125 value!

Subscribe by email or by RSS today!

They don’t just dislike the changes, they despise them:

As someone who reads and observes design quite a bit, I appreciate the simpler design (I hated their miserable navigation before) but I am a bit miffed that they simply stole Twitter’s simplicity and built their page into a stream.

I’m unsure of the process that Facebook utilized… first in what motivating them to make the changes and second to push a wholesale change with so many users engaged. I do respect Facebook for taking the risk. There aren’t too many companies with their volume of traffic that would do this, especially since their growth is still on the upswing.

It’s important to note that change is always difficult. If you roll out a new user interface for an application that people have been using for years, don’t expect the emails to come pouring in thanking you. Users hate change.

How did it Start?

I’m looking forward to reading more on the methodology Facebook utilized. My experience tells me that they probably enlisted some power users or a focus group to do the design, paid a big ‘ol stack of money to some human computer interaction and user experience experts, and formulated a plan based on the majority decision. Majority decisions suck, though.

Majority decisions don’t allow for unique individuality. Read Douglas Bowman’s announcement on quitting Google, it’s an eye-opener.

Focus groups suck, don’t work either. There is a ton of evidence that suggests that people who volunteer or are recruited to focus groups walk into the group compelled to provide criticism for any design. Focus groups can derail a great, intuitive and radical design. Focus groups tend to bring a user interface down to the least common denominator rather than something new and refreshing.

Why did Facebook Change?

Another question for Facebook – why did you opt for a forced change? It seems to me that the new design and old design could have both been incorporated with some fairly simple options for the user. Empower your users to utilize the interface they’d like instead of forcing it on them.

I’m confident the new design was initiated to remove some of the complexity of the old navigation system. It will be a lot easier now for a new user to get up and running (in my opinion). So – why not make it the default interface for new users and offer additional options for experienced users?

What does Facebook Do Now?

The (multi) million dollar question now for Facebook. Bad feedback feeds bad feedback. Once the survey on the new interface reaches a 70% negative rate, watch out! Even if the design was fantastic, the survey results will continue to go downhill. If I were working for Facebook, I wouldn’t pay attention to the survey anymore.

Facebook does have to respond to the negative feedback, though. The irony will be when they offer both choices and the majority of users keep the new look.

It takes additional development, but I’d always recommend two alternatives to pushing change: gradual change or options for change are the best approach.

I responded, “What are you trying to achieve?”

I won’t go into details on what the response was nor what my recommendations were, but it was really evident that:

1. The client did not know what they were trying to achieve with their web site.
2. The web design firms they had connected with were simply pushing their portfolios and awards.

There are more kinds of web designers out there than I can describe, but the best ones will start their conversations with, “What are you trying to achieve?” Depending on the answer, they’ll know whether or not your business is a fit with theirs, and ultimately whether or not they’ll be successful at meeting your objectives. Ask for and follow up with their recent clients to find references for other clients they’ve worked with who had the same objectives as yours to find out how it was to work with them.

Are you a small company trying to look like a big one? Are you trying to build brand awareness? Search engine placement? Is your company trying to build a portal to communicate with clients? With prospects? Are you using other tools and services you’d like to automate and integrate through your website?

Basing your Web Design on a dollar amount and a portfolio is a dangerous game. Chances are that you’ll be shopping soon enough as technologies advance and you find your site isn’t meeting its needs. The best designers typically find a popular framework to build your site on so that it can expanded as new requirements come to fruition. The best designers will look to build a relationship, not a contract. The best designers will utilize the highest web standards and cross-browser compliance.

Get used to web design costs being an ongoing budget rather than a one-time expense. Get used to continuous improvement rather than timely completion of an overall project. I would rather add a feature a month for a year than wait a year for my site to go live!

Choose your Web Designer carefully. I know there are a lot of great designers (and a lot of crappy ones). More often than not, though, I’ve found that a disastrous web design project has more to do with the match of the web designers strengths to the objectives of the organization.

One of the challenges in the Restaurant Industry is working with folks that don’t have time to test their marketing nor play with technology as often as they should. Thankfully, our Director of Marketing, Marty Bird, is helping our customers bridge that gap with monthly newsletters packed with info.

In our most recent newsletter, Marty spoke about the importance of a call to action. If you’ve got a single page in your website, or a single email that goes out, without a call to action – you’re really missing the opportunity to convert some clients.

Some folks think that callouts are just plain cheesy, but they work. They work on a number of levels.

3 Reasons Why Calls to Action Work:

• Usability – If your page is designed well, with little distractions, a callout will gain the attention of the customers – making it obvious where they can click to navigate, download, register, etc. There’s nothing worse than getting a visitor’s attention, then losing them because they don’t know where to click next.
• Options – Just as important, visitors will often come to your site because they landed there from a search, it’s important to provide them a path to continue your relationship. They may have found what they are looking for, but offering them something else can keep them coming back!
• Curiosity – There’s a certain percentage of users who just like to click on stuff. Providing a nice bold callout can provide them with the target they’re looking for. Additionally, it could bring you a new sale.

If a call to action with a bold callout isn’t on your check list when creating a website or email, be sure to add it today.

NOTE: How did I build the counter? Building out the counter for the Callout was a combination of PHP and JavaScript. The onclick event for the callout actually uses an image swap to advance the count. This way the count is advanced with each click, but not each page load.

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Elliot Jay Stocks is putting out the battle cry for designers… abandon the Web 2.0 look and fight your clients who push for it.

NOTE: Be sure to visit Elliot’s site, the design is absolutely stunning.

I disagree with Elliot that it should be destroyed. Working in the Marketing field, you recognize that there is a herd mentality to design. Companies like Apple have some deep pockets and have an expectation of design genius associated with their brand. The consumer expects that the designs associated with Apple’s products, packaging and marketing will break new ground. (Except for the black background ads with the bright light on one side of the spokesperson… I think it looks ridiculous).

The rest of the companies are best suited to follow the lead. Just as fashion follows trends, so does design. The ‘herd’ appreciates visual aesthetics that provides indication that it’s related to a specific trend or technology. When I come across a new application like Mixx or rssHugger, before I ever dig into the application, I’m struck with the visual cue that this is an application built on the newest technology.

Individuality and creativity are important, but when everyone else is wearing boot leg jeans and you show up in bell bottoms, people will immediately question your fashion sense. Right or wrong, this is human behavior. In this day and age where consumers are swiftly moving from MySpace to Facebook, or Twitter to Tumblr, it’s important that your design emulates that you have adopted the latest fashion on the web.

I respect Elliot’s opinion as a talented artist and unique designer, but I’d recommend companies don’t scrap Web 2.0 design just yet. Even Elliot admits that there are good reasons to follow the herd. Elliot and I do agree on the real challenge: How to work within the boundaries of Web 2.0 aesthetics and still come off as being original. And if you’re looking for what elements are key, Elliot’s put together a great presentation with all the aesthetics associated with Web 2.0 design!