We wanted to say hi and share with you some of the latest web designs and brands we have been working on. Our team has spent a lot of time carefully studying, analyzing, designing and hand crafting these art pieces. Every design is different and created with love. 

Without further ado, here they are:

Sage Listings

SageListings is a distressed commercial real estate auctions company. They maximize returns for buyers and sellers by showing how “Greening” their buildings will impact a property’s return on investment. 

sagelistings

Visit SageLisiting.com or see our work done for SageListings.  

Lotus Partners

Lotus Partners has one mission – connect green employers, executives, and professionals. Lotus Partners is “the” green jobs company. 

Visit theLotusPartners.com or see our work done for Lotus Partners.

readytext

readytext offers content creation and repurposing for instructional, training, promotional and technical publications. 

Visit readytext.com or see our work done for readytext.

Raw Treasure

Eating raw nuts and fresh fruits is said to be good for health. If you are into that kind of a thing, then get your raw nuts at rawtreausure.com. 

See our work done for Raw Treasure.

Lotus Culture

Yan-Fen Wang wants to teach you the ways of the Chinese culture from FengShui to Chinese cooking. 

Visit LotusCulture.com or see our work done for Yan-Fen.

Radiance Consulting Group

Radiance is made up of senior business and community leaders committed to the advocacy and advisory for the green economy. 

Visit RadianceCG.com or see our work done for the Radiance Consulting Group. 

WhatCounts

Seattle based WhatCounts is a leader in e-communication programs. The latest version gets a serious facelift. 

Visit WhatCounts.com or see our work done for WhatCounts. 

Wait, there is more!! Feel free to visit our design shop to see other work in our portfolio. Please let us know if you would like a audience-winning web brand for your organization.

I beleive that Wall Street Journal’s focus was large corporates, and we synthesized the article from the view point of Small to Medium organizations. 

We sat down and analyzed what Web 2.0 marketing techniques that we have advised to our customers have worked and which ones haven’t. Pretty much every site that is built by a reasonable design firm has a Blog component in it. Besides Blog there are a number of other Web 2.0 techniques that businesses employ (at-least at technical level). RSS, Viral Videos, Facebook, Electronic Newsletters, Linkedin, BizNik, are just few examples of such venues.

But question is have the small and medium business used Blog and other techniques effectively to market their services – I think not.

I tend to agree with my friends at WSJ that businesses tend to use these services and techniques to “sell” their product. Although the end goal is selling; it annoys users. 

Rather businesses should use Blog, and rest of Web 2.0 strategies to engage their customers and partners in a conversation with the company and with each other. Most businesses miss this super important point. for example if you are a chiropractor business, you should use your blog to inform users about certain way of resting your head on a pillow to reduce neck stress, and then invite your users to share their experience with you and with each other. Watch the conversations grow between your users, and moderate it only to a point, and let it flow free for most part.

Your goal should be such that your customer “Jill” who has just participated in that neck pain discussion, informs her best friend “Joanna” about this thread of discussion. Now Joanna is also visiting your Blog site, appreciating the knowledge she gathered here, and may click over your “Contact” tab for a free consultatioon with you. 

Wall Street Journal missed an important business tool in their discussion which is e-Newsletter marketing. Research and conversations with our own cusotmers have shown that e-Newsletters are very effective and economical, and ROI is high. I guess that e-Newsletter is not your classic Web 2.0 tool by definition, but an effective for businesses. It costs very little to implement and operate, to be missed in your marketing arsenal. 

In summary here is an advice for businesses when it comes to Web 2.0 marketing:

1. Use web 2.0 tools to engage customers and business partners in a conversation as oppose to simply publishing your blogs.
2. Give users a reason to engage – they have to have incentive for engagement. Two main reward types, 1) Cash/Free Product/Free Services rewards 2) Peer recognition. 
3. Need to moderate as conversations may drift away or stale. However resist the temptation to fully control the user dialogue. 
4. Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell, instead invite to participate and listen.
5. If you are large company, hire someone fulltime with a good combination of marketing, technology and consumer psychological skills. For small to medium business, rely on a good web firm for your Web 2.0 needs.

JellyFish

Zazzle

WildGardenDesign

Shopify

Hymini

Etsy

StylePath

Partybeans

CafePress

Apple Store

1. Web Design that Builds Credibility.
A good professionally designed website makes a dynamic impression on its visitors. On the web, no one needs to know you’re a ‘one-man band’. When you choose someone to build a website for your business, do not use cost as the single decision factor. Yes, you can rule out those firms who quote well beyond your budget, but beware of those who are considerably cheaper than the norm. Your website may end up looking like something from a hobbyist’s hands or a template. A potential client will be much more likely to choose to do business with a website that looks professional like the one on the left rather than the one on the right.

Also beware of excessive graphic work. A flash based intro may be a designer’s brag, but could turn half of the customers away at the door step.

2. Complete and Detailed Product/Service Description
I can’t remember how many times I have recoiled at buying a product online because I wasn’t sure about its exact dimension or tone of color. It is crucial to reveal everything customers need to know about the product or service, and this is not limited to an e-commerce website. Having your services detailed on the web can turn a website visit into a phone inquiry or a customer visit. Nothing showcases a product or service better than a picture. Take high quality pictures. Allow users to see a much larger picture if they ask for it. If needed, provide a picture gallery that shows various aspects of a product like Amazon does.

3. A Little Personal Touch
Sometimes customers feel more comfortable doing business with a small shop than a corporate giant. That’s why some people prefer a community bank over BOA. A professional website doesn’t have to be impersonal. On the “About Us” page, tell a story about how you started this business, what motivates you, etc. My client, who sells nuts online, let it be known she was committed to supporting family farms and offering sustainably grown organic nuts.

4. Specify Your Business Location
Some business owners who operate in their garages would be reluctant to display a physical address on the website. Customers who find only an email address on your “Contact” page may worry about your business stability as well as after sale support. Even though most customers will use email or phone to communicate with you, it gives them peace of mind to know that you are in a physical location where they can find you.

About the author: Yilei Wang, Creative Director at web design firm EfuRa.com.  

cogmap

cookthink

jaman

springloops

wufoo

visionati

socialgrapes

diettv

sutori

exploratree

Are you inventing a problem?

It is startling that a good amount of startups are working to solve self-invented problems.  This factor alone contributes more to the failure of startups than anything else.  Recently, my partner came across an entrepreneur who is building a site for users to search for local businesses.  His story essentially is that Google, whose algorithms focus on web page relevance, does not give good results for local business search, hence his site will attract all those who are unsatisfied with their Google experience.  I do agree that Google is not an optimal place for this kind of search queries.  But the question he failed to answer is whether a computer savvy person faces difficulty today finding a local business.  CitySearch or Yelp is a good resource if I care about what people think is great in town.  If I am more interested in finding a location specific business, I find Google Maps comes in handy.  Overall I don’t see a problem that needs fixing in this area.  How do you find out if you are inventing a problem?  Get out of your head, get in front of your target customers.

How much is the pain? 

When you have determined that you are indeed cracking a real problem, the next question is: How painful is it for customers?  Behavioral change is tough.  Is the headache big enough, so end users are willing to include you in their frequent sites, or businesses would bother to alter their work flow?  Are you helping increase a clients revenue, productivity, or reducing their costs?  The fact is that a majority of social network sites out there flunked.  A nice-to-have web app just isn’t good enough.  You don’t want to be building a product that is chasing a Facebook fad.  You should aim at building a profitable business.  Again the best way to gauge this is through field study.  However it could be tricky.  Often times entrepreneurs only hear what they want to hear.  To get useful feedback, whether it be a formal questionnaire or a casual chat with friends, remember to keep your questions unbiased and unambiguous.  You can find more tips at: 9 Tips to Create an Effective Survey.

Did you hit the nail on the head?

If you believe that you are addressing a few real pain points, is your solution right on the target?  37signals, a rising star in Startup world, aims for web apps that “do just what you need and nothing you don’t”.  The problem is that their apps are lacking some serious features common users need.  For example, BaseCamp – a project collaboration portal, does not have an elegant document sharing solution which is a basic requirement.  In the attempt to strive for simplicity and friendly UX, 37signals falls short on fulfilling essential business needs, like a fancy toy hammer that is unable to do the job.  Hence it’s crucial to design your features based on what people really want.  Jakob Nielsen wrote insightfully about why not to trust what users say in First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users.  The same rule applies to other areas such as business validation, feature design, etc.  What people think they want can be very different from what they actually need.  Nothing is more helpful than sitting with end users and observing them do the work the application is supposed to support.

Did you land in a new world? 

Analyze your contemporaries (companies doing similar things) to learn from them and carve out your edge.  If you don’t find any contemporaries, it calls for concern rather than celebration.  It’s a rare occasion when nobody else synchronizes with one’s thought vibe in this world.  If nobody else is thinking similar thoughts, be alarmed.  Go back and work on questions 1-3 again.  Did you just invent a problem? Is the market not worth pursuing? Is the idea not hitting the target?  I once worked for a payment solutions startup and we thought we had an unprecedented idea at that time.  It was not until several months down the development phase that we discovered that several other companies had worked on similar approaches.  From their experiences we learned about the hurdles we had to overcome.  So it’s a blessing to locate contemporaries earlier on in the game, and study them thoroughly.  Don’t believe too quickly you are the first one to discover a new world!

These websites share common web 2.0 design elements:

1.       Strong branding in logo design. 
2.       Bold color expression.
3.       Extensive use of gradients, reflections, highlights, drop shadows and round corners.
4.       Large font size to draw attention. 
5.       High quality icons. 

socialgo

circos

belysio

apptism

mobango

planeteye

guitarati

alerts

quotesdaddy

mint

Maximum Browse Area +10 points
First impression opening up Chrome is that it has a huge browse area to view web pages.  Upon a detailed look, I found Chrome had only two nav bars – a tab bar and an address bar, which gives you a browse area of 710 px in height.  In IE you have a title bar, an address bar, a tab bar, and a status bar all the way down.  That leaves 680 px high in the browse area. One can argue IE has a Full Screen option, but few people will bother to flip the switch in a hidden menu, which brings me to the next point.

Minimalist Control Interface +10 points
Compared to eleven navigation/control icons spread across two nav bars in IE, Chrome has control icons reduced to 7 all on one address bar.  Most controls, such as home page setting and print button, are buried beneath the page control icon and the browser control icon to the right.  Google understands user psyche very well. Average users don’t care to see or flip through a pile of settings.  State of the art design makes the default behaviors so friendly that users rarely have to reconfigure them.  This is something Microsoft doesn’t understand. Just look at the daunting amount of settings in IE’s Internet Options.  

The Back Button – a bit too minimalist -5 points
Being used to hopping back multiple pages at once in IE (by using a little drop down right by the back button), I felt quite annoyed having to click the back button repeatedly in Chrome.  Although I did learn later that right clicking on the back button pulls up previous page list, it could be made a lot more obvious nonetheless.  

Tabs – faster, higher, stronger, better +5 points
Opening and closing tabs in Chrome feels smoother and faster.  In IE, it takes two clicks to close a tab – first to bring the tab to front; second to close it.  Chrome has a close button visible on each tab regardless it’s at front or at background.  Tabs in Chrome are positioned high at top, which leaves more room for browsing.  Chrome also features tab isolation: if a Web page causes a problem with Chrome and leads to a crash, the crash will affect only the tab displaying the page and not the whole program.  Last, a new tab in Chrome opens up with thumbnail images of your most visited sites, shows recent bookmarks, and supplies a search field for searching your page history; versus a blank page in IE.  

I Love the Find Bar +10 points
Hit Ctrl+f, and try to search for a word in the web page?  You will fall in love with Chrome find bar immediately.  Before you hit enter as you are entering the letters, Chrome has already started searching, and highlighted the matching letters for you.  You just wish your eyes could keep up to the speed.  

No More Hassle on Pop-up Blocker +5 points
We all know pop-ups are annoying.  In IE, you have this pop-up blocker thing that suppresses pop-ups.  But your eyes get tired of staring at this pop-up blocker all the time. In case it is a pop-up you want to see, you will then scratch your head over a multiple choice: a) temporarily allow pop-ups. b) always allow pop-ups from this site…!  I have to give it to Chrome on this one.  It has a blocked pop-up title bar at the bottom right.  Most of the time you won’t pay attention to it, or simply click to open it up.  I found the experience to be quite effortless.  

Overall I think Chrome has thought through a lot in terms of the user experience area.  It is definitely a serious player in the browser market.   However I am more curious to see how Google via Chrome will unfold its plan of replacing Windows with “cloud computing” eventually.