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In the last segment about sitemap creation for J.R. Johnson, Inc., we described how we planned out, divided, and arranged the contents of J.R. Johnson’s website into pages. The next step in organizing all this information is called wireframing. Wireframing outlines the arrangement of content on a page to provide a clean, simple, and functional user experience.

What is a website wireframe?

A wireframe is much like a newspaper layout. It is used to determine how much space titles, texts blocks, and pictures will take up and how they are arranged. As the name suggests, a wireframe is a mockup of the finished website using only borderlines and descriptions of each section. Similar to a newspaper layout, different page templates are used depending on the purpose of the page.

For example, think of the home page of a website as the cover page of the newspaper. Most of the space is taken up by pictures, headlines, and introductory text to each of the top stories, and references on how to find other news within the paper.

There are also cover pages for each section; for example, living, sports, and business. These pages would are like level one pages of a sitemap. For the J.R. Johnson website these pages would be service category pages like construction defect repair, fire damage restoration, storm damage restoration. These pages will be similar to the cover page but with more text and content specific to that section.

Finally, there are the internal pages. These pages are very text heavy. This is where most of the specific information for their category is found.

What function does it serve in creating a finished product of a website?

Wireframing plays a major role in creating the user experience (UX) of a web page. In general, people have basic expectations of what they will find on a web page and how they will interact with it. In creating a wireframe, designers consider:

where to place standard website components like logos, navigation bars, search boxes, and contact information so that a user can easily find them,
text, image, and video priority to direct users to the most important and personally relevant information and do it in a visually appealing way,
what links are placed where on the page in order to allow the user to easily navigate to the information that they are seeking.

If considering the interplay of all of these factors is not enough, the designer will also have to consider the tastes of the client. The sitemap serves as both a blueprint for UX and proof for the client.

How is a wireframe made?

Wireframing is the interface and alignment of every department within Zoom Creates. Most of the time our marketing goals, creative aspirations, and the restrictions of internet code all align to create a glorious website workflow. Sometimes wireframe creation is an interdepartmental cage fight with the website client as a referee.

Our primary focus is our client’s business goal. In this case, the goals are to position J.R. Johnson at the forefront of the market by presenting them as the most up-to-date, trusted, and knowledgeable of their industry and then to provide them with as many leads as possible. This meant creating a website that is intuitive, transparent and packed with high quality, highly user-relevant information.

With the business and website goals in mind, the wireframe was designed to navigate people to the service and information that is most relevant to them. As Corrina pointed out, “If someone’s house was on fire, they’re not going to care about construction defect repair.” The content will then be organized on the page to easily answer their most urgent questions and finally the user will be directed to a contact form or to call J.R. Johnson, Inc. to answer any additional questions they may have or to request an estimate.

One aspect that affects the wireframe creation is the textual information on each page. In the next segment of the Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series, we will detail the process of informative copywriting for SEO and show how it affects J.R. Johnson, Inc.’s business and website goals.

To follow this series, “Like” us on Facebook or subscribe to a feed below.

See the rest of Zoom Creates’ Web Design Process Series for J.R. Johnson

NEXT STEPS:

Step 6: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series - Design Approach

Step 7: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series - Copy Writing

Step 8: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series ‎- Breaking Points

Step 9: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series - Development

Step 10: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series - CMS

Step 11: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series - SEO

Step 12: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series - Testing

Step 13: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series - Analytics

Step 14: The Zoom Creates Website Design Series - Launch

Should Your Business be on Pinterest—an Infographic

Robin Budd — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:45:13 +0000

With Pinterest’s heavy traffic and ever-growing popularity, many brands have been making the leap and joining the site every day. For many, it has been a mecca for pushing traffic to their business, giving them a platform to develop a great community and offering a new way to connect with their audience and spread their brand. In seeing this potential, our clients have been asking, is jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon right for my business?

Make a Strategy

As with any social media site, it is important to educate yourself on the platform, learning what is involved in being a truly active member and how much time it would take to maintain your profile. Not all businesses are right for Pinterest. You need figure out if your offerings and capabilities are compatible for the site and then build a solid strategy before you make the leap. Joining any social media site takes time, effort and, in the case of Pinterest, awesome imagery and great content. So, is your business ready to make the commitment?

Check out our infographic to find out if your business is right for Pinterest. Then read below to learn the 4 incredibly important questions you should ask yourself to find out if your business is ready to join up.

Below are 4 incredibly important questions to ask yourself to find out if your business is ready to join Pinterest:

1. Can you stay active on Pinterest?

Before joining in, it’s important to figure out if you have enough time and effort to stay involved and get the most out of Pinterest. Being active on Pinterest means, pinning, repinning, commenting, or liking images on a regular basis that are relevant to your brand. Daily activity is best, adding roughly 1-30 pins across a variety of your boards. These pins should be from your own content, other original sources on the internet and users on the site. All this activity takes time—a lot of it. Pinterest can become a time-suck for your business if you do not have a strategy in place for how you are going to use it and how much time in a day you will spend being involved on the site.

Worried you may not have the time to stay active? A great way to get pins on your board regularly is to invite guest pinners to collaborate on your boards. Just make sure they share the vision and values of the company and will pin content relevant to your business. People love to follow users that are active pinners—If you join the site and remain inactive, you’ll go nowhere. You will need to make sure you can allot enough time and effort into staying involved on the site to reap the greatest benefits for your business.

2. Do you have visually engaging imagery, or can you create it?

Pinterest is an exceptionally visual space. People go there to get inspired, collect and organize the things they find across the internet—and being able to contribute visually interesting content is vital. if your business is already producing great imagery, you have a jump start on what you need to be involved on Pinterest. If you don’t already have great images, it’s time to create them. You may consider hiring a professional photographer or graphic designer to help enhance the imagery on your site or blog if you’re not able to produce it yourself. The question is, does your business have the time, money and energy to create content? If yes, then Pinterest may be right for you.

Eye catching images and content are one of the most vital parts of successfully marketing your business on Pinterest.

3. Is your target audience using Pinterest?

Before you jump on to Pinterest you need to ask yourself, who is my target audience? If it’s female, you’re at an advantage. About 80% of Pinterest users are female, so having a product or service that appeals to that demographic is important to your success with the site. You must consider if your product or service is something that will visually appeal to women or if it’s something a woman may purchase, find helpful or want to share. This is not to say that a male-oriented product may not do well, you may just have to change your approach and get creative with how you showcase your brand across the site. The key to being successful on Pinterest is figuring out how your business can fit into the lifestyle of the highly female user base. If you can, Pinterest may be for you.

4. Do you have more to share than just what you do?

Pinterest is all about content you share, not only the product or service you provide. Sharing your own products and services on Pinterest is great, but your page shouldn’t be limited to your own work. Users get turned off when a brand becomes too salesy. They want to see items that are useful or interesting to them, not just a product list. Pinterest is all about telling a story with your brand, using imagery and content to build a lifestyle around your business. It gives you a way to reveal more about your brand personality rather than just your product line.

Use Pinterest to clarify who you are by posting inspiring images, news, tips, infographics, customer photos, or products from other companies. Pins can be used to highlight aspects of your business that may not come to mind when people first think about your brand. For example, if you own a hotel, Pinterest would not only be a great opportunity to show off your property, but you could create boards of local attractions, best scenic areas, local deals, dining spots, or even tips on how to pack your suitcase. Sharing more than just what you do will give users more reasons to connect and follow your business.

Petplan Pet Insurance is a good example of a business that is sharing information beyond what they do. You wouldn’t necessarily think insurance would be an ideal candidate for a Pinterest page, but with all the boards dedicated to different aspects of our furry friends, they have succeeded in using Pinterest to tell a story about their company.

Should your business join Pinterest?

If you can answer yes to all these questions, you should definitely consider getting on board with Pinterest. This means you’ve got the drive, resources, and creativity to make Pinterest a successful marketing tool for your business. If your answer is no to the majority of these questions, your offerings may not be completely compatible with Pinterest. It’s going to take a lot more energy for your business to be successful on the site. You must then determine if the benefits are worth your time or if pursuing alternative social media or marketing options would be more of an advantage to your business.

For more pinteresting tips on Pinterest, check out my related post:
How to Increase Your Pinterest Followers: 20 Pinteresting Tips
How to Create Pinterest Images that People Love to Pin: 7 Pinteresting Tips

And as always, don’t forget to follow me on Pinterest, and of course, Zoom Creates.

The Analytics of Love

Trevor Fox — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 21:33:03 +0000

What Statistics and Analysis Tell us About Love

This Valentines Day, I want to tell you about my love for people…watching. You can call me a creep but you’d probably have to call yourself a creep then too. I love the little differences between how people should behave and the way people actually do. I live everyday to enjoy these little morsels of idiosyncratic human behavior. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the moment you catch a guy at the gym just staring at a girl’s butt as they walk by or when you go to a concert and see your boss dressed as a centaur.

Internet analytics give you better insight into human behavior than any kind of observation or report of everyday life. If you want to know yourself, skip a psychologist and keep your browsing history and take a look at it over the last month. You are your browsing history. View your history since 1990 and you will get a better “timeline” of your life than Facebook could ever hope to portray.

We cruise the Internet, like we cruise around our own homes, not wearing pants and eating scrambled eggs over the sink. Ok, that was my morning. We all tend to wear a scruffy old pair of sweatpants more often than we probably would on a first date. You could call it self-awareness, you could call it shame, but the fact is, we act differently when we are not around anyone else. Our use of the Internet shows our own intents and purposes in this very same way.

It’s Valentines Day today and people are looking for love. Well at least they’re searching for it. What better day is there to share with you what analytics has told us of the enigmatic human behavior of love. Ok, and lust too.

They’re searching for it. See, Google says so:

The Blue line is the number of searchers for “love.” The Red line is the number of searches for “valentines.” This is called a correlation.

Analytics is all about quantifying data and finding meaningful relationships within the data. It is much like your everyday use of intuition but we base our decisions on large collections of data. Internet usage, and it may surprise you, is made into metrics and quantified. Quantified metrics, now things are really getting sexy.

One common metric we use is time. Just like you use time to measure things in your relationship, we use it to:

Aggregate interest of webpages and activities. Like when you:
Check the duration of a phone call with your significant other.

Measure rate of change of something. Like when you:
Note how many times you have to ask your significant other to do something for you, per time, over time.

Measure trends between variables. Like when you:
Notice how much your significant other will do your dishes for you proportional to the amount of time you do “X.” No pun intended.

Here is an example of how we use time to measure a relationship of time. To clarify, we segment each age (a measurement of time) by each whole year and by the ages of women. Then we measure what ages these men are pursuing. That’s why there are distinct pixels in this graph. Each pixel box represents the proportionality of occurrences the whole population of a man of that age Y is sending a message to a women who is age X. As you would expect, it is very uncommon for a 22 year old man to send a message to a 45 year old woman, not proportionally uncommon for 45 year old men to message 22 year old women.

To be fair, I will show the data for both relationships of the sexes.

Another metric we often use is location. We use location to target specific audiences and to see what audiences are searching for and consuming our content. I was happy to fumble across this article from the Huffington Post during my research. As it turns out Portland, OR is having the most promiscuous sex over any other location. Portland seems to have a lot of notable distinctions. For some reason, they are all the wierd ones.

What Cities are Having the Most Promiscuous Sex

The breakdown looks like this:
1. Portland
2. Seattle
3. Pittsburgh
4. Miami
5. San Francisco
6. Dallas
7. San Bernardino, Calif.
8. Denver
9. San Diego
10. Houston

We measure this data in the same way that we made the heat map of message target rate (above). We use location coordinates rather than age coordinates to show the expression of a variable. In this case the variable is frequency of bathing.

The question is: How often do you bathe or shower?

Red means less bathing. Green means more. Yellow is right around average. You get it.

I don’t know what this says about love, but again it sure gives us Oregonian another dubious distinction.

Another way we measure human behavior is by quantifying content. If you have ever had a girlfriend, you know that they count “I love you,” and their margin of error is probably less than one. Google does this too in several ways. It measures quantity of content searched for and consumed for trends (above example of “love” and “valentines”) and it measures quantity of content created to show relationships.

Here is an example of how we can quantify specific terms and visually show how they relate to a second variable, in this case, message reply rate. Creepy or not, Ok Cupid has “read” all the text of a lot of messages and found that these terms have a special value.

Here we see how mentioning specific interest and characteristics relate to the reply rate to a first message. Consider that the overall average reply rate is 27%. This would suggest that people might:

a) Have significantly higher interest in these things

b) Place a high value in commonality of these interests or characteristics

c) Recognize that the portion of people that value these things is relatively low so the value of having them in common is relatively high

Finally, because I love flow charts.

We can use page analytics to show sequences. Most often we measure navigation, but in this case, this is a sequence of conditions that would determine whether you are a match for OK Cupid’s creator Chris Coyne.

In conclusion, I love that everyday Zoom Creates pays me to geek out about human behavior. It’s not always as exciting as love and lust, but it is always about relationships. I hope that you have enjoyed this and maybe that math, statistics and analytics became a little more interesting and relevant. If you are one of my friends… and you made it all the way through, hopefully now you can understand why I am so weird…besides living in Portland.

Thank you OkCupid for all the great analytics.

Step 4a: The Zoom Creates Website Design Process Series – How Zoom Creates a Sitemap

Trevor Fox — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:04:33 +0000

Step 4a in a series that illustrates the Zoom Creates process in Designing, Developing and ultimately Launching a website for our client, J.R. Johnson Inc.

In Part Three we described what a sitemap is and what role it plays in planning the finished website. As explained in Part 3, the sitemap serves to organize all the information on a website in a way that makes site navigation easy and intuitive. Creating the sitemap is like creating a blueprint for the website. Designing the sitemap is often considered the most important step in creating a website because, as Corrina, Zoom’s Art Director points out, “Creating a sitemap forces you to conceive of the design and content in terms of the end product.”

To organize the sitemap for J.R. Johnson, we had to segment and arrange their business in a way that fits into a hierarchical sitemap layout. In most cases, we will take into account the established industry standard of organization that site visitors already know. With this standard organization in mind, we tailor it to the business. If there is no standard or the standard can be improved upon, we will start with that standard and rearrange it until it becomes most effective.

Site pages colored by relevance.

We began with the sitemap of J.R. Johnson Inc.’s previous website as a template. Unfortunately, one reason that J.R. Johnson Inc. needed a new website was that the organization of their previous website was unclear and overly complicated. In our office, we often hear Zachary, our Director of Digital Marketing, say, “This is a maze, it needs to be a hallway.”

To provide site visitors with a hallway to what they are looking for, we consulted with Alisa Gaylord, J.R. Johnson Inc.’s Director of Business Development and Client Services, and we re-categorized and prioritized pages from the previous website by visitor relevance.

Most relevant pages are most easily accessible.

We then brought those pages to the forefront of the website and made them easily accessible from the homepage and one click away from any page of the site. (Side Image)

The final version of the sitemap highlights the most important reasons to visit J.R. Johnson Inc.’s website: information on the services they offer, and how to contact the company for these services. The challenge of the next step in creating a website is to organize and prioritize information in the same way but this time for the visual layout of each page. This visual mock-up of each page is called wireframing. In the next post, we will describe how wireframing begins to plan out the site structure, page organization and overall user experience.