Wait for it…

Earthwork Media is proud to announce Sales X-Ray. The Sales X-Ray platform offers an easy online sales document creation and tracking system to help you and your sales team easily monitor what your prospects do once they receive your sales information; when they access it, how often, and even what interests them most within each document.

Analytics

With in-depth page tracking and analytics, you can accurately assess how long each viewer spent on each page of your document, allowing you to gain insight into what your prospect’s specific interests.

Creating Documents

Sales X-Ray has an intuitive document creation system that will allow you to begin creating, sending, and tracking your sales documents within minutes. You can also choose to simply upload a PDF and Sales X-Ray will automatically generate a multi-page document for you.

Wikapedia defines parallax scrolling as:

“…a special scrolling technique in computer graphics, first popularized in the 1982 arcade game Moon Patrol. In this pseudo-3D technique, background images move by the “camera” slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in a 2D video game and adding to the immersion. The technique grew out of the multiplane camera technique used in traditional animation since the 1940s.” source

Basically, it’s a fun and unique way to design a site that has not been overdone quite yet. That said, if you decide you would like to try parallax scrolling on your site you need to make sure that it will be worth it. As with all design decisions you must think long and hard about your target audience. Will they care? Will their browser support it (versions of IE before 9 can’t, and parallax will not display on mobile devices). All-in-all, this technique works well for younger, more tech-savvy and design minded demographics and is definitely a strong web design trend of 2011.

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Want to Try it Out

Ian Lunn has a great parallax tutorial on how to achieve the Nike Better World effect.

Know Any Other Good Paralax Examples?

Leave a comment, we always like seeing what people find out there.

Eight quick tips on writing effective and profit turning copy for the web.

1 ) Content before design
Would you buy an expensive and ornate frame for a painting and then just throw something you drew on the back of a napkin in it? Too often, it seems that is what clients want to do with a website. They want to design a site, the frame for your content, before the content even exists…and then “just toss the content in there”.

This is wrong. Your content is what your website is presenting. When you browse online, you are doing so to look at content, whether it is an article, a picture or a video. Your website design is going to be far far (far!) more effective if you have the content ready and in place before the actual designing takes place. That way, the “frame” for your content can match and more efficiently bring your content to light.

2 ) Write for people, not for Google
You want your site to rank high for certain terms. Of course. The temptation can be to “keyword stuff”, i.e. try to mention your keywords as often as possible. This can lead to some really interesting copy:

Earthwork Media is an Austin based web design company specializing in web design. Our web designs are top notch and will leave your company with the best web design when your company is looking for a new web design.

Don’t do that. First, the search engines are way smarter than that now, this kind of thing worked a lot better in 1999. Secondly, it reads as spammy or, worse, incoherent to the people that actually get to your site. There is no point in getting more people to your site if they leave thinking of you as scammy or, worse, dumb.

3 ) Choose a voice and stick to it.
The “voice” of your content refers to a few things. One is the actual tone and style or your site. You want to come off professional, fun and professional, snobby hipster pseudo-intellectual, a bit silly, or whatever fits your company best. Pick one, own it, and stick to it.

The next part or your voice is the general theme you wish to be prevalent throughout your site. Usually this is some type of competitive advantage you want your readers to be constantly aware of.

4 ) Ask yourself what your users are looking for
When you are writing your site copy, don’t forget that you only have a few seconds to catch someones interest…and that everyone has a bit of ADHD when surfing online. You want them to be able to quickly find what they are looking for or else they will look somewhere else. Ask yourself, “why are people at my site?”, “how did they get here?” and “why should they stay?” and use that knowledge to give people a reason to make it longer than a few seconds on your site.

5 ) Content is more than text
Don’t forget that your content isn’t just text. Pictures, videos and information graphics can be just as key to your information presentation as text. A well designed graphic can give people the information they need in fractions of a second that would take hundreds or words to explain.

6 ) Keep your content focused
Again, people online are extremely impatient. Don’t try to cram everything you want to say onto your website and end up with 10 or 20 paragraphs on every page. Keep your content to the more important and salient points you are trying to make. For example, in your biography on your about page, you might have a lot of things you have done you are proud of. Think of the best three. Everyone but your mother doesn’t want to read more than a paragraph or two about you.

6 ) Cut text in half…really.
You have gone ahead and limited your copy to the things you think are the most important so that people can quickly read your content and get the information information quickly and easily.

Great.

Now cut your content in half. Try to use the most economical language. Get rid of needless adjectives. Refine, refine and refine.

7 ) Update, update, update
Once your content is up and online you are done! Right? Sorry. Nope. Websites that update content at least once a week (like through a blog) see an average of 300% more traffic than those that do not. 300%!

8 ) Revisit
Not only should you be creating new content, but don’t forget to go back and revisit your content. Be sure to look for ROT (Redundant, Outdated and Trivial information). Check to see which pages have the longest page views and lowest exit rates. What are you doing there that is so effective?

This blog post takes a lot of key points from Dr. Susan Weinschenk’s book Neuro Web Design, a highly recommended read for those responsible for managing or building websites.

Guess what? You overrate how much your ration and reason play into your decision making. You really overrate it. Want an example? In his recent book, The Social Animal, New York Times columnist David Brooks gives as an example a widely sourced study on choices in surgery. One group was told that the surgery has an 85% success rate. The other was told the surgery has a 15% failure rate. Obviously, rationally this is the same rate, however, far more people opted for the surgery when it was framed as a 85% success rate. Why? Their unconscious and emotions took over in the decision making.

Below are four key ways to make your website more effective using the unconscious mind.

1) Give Away Free Stuff
When you give something away for free, people feel like they owe you something. You may not get this something right away, and you may never get it, but it increases your changes of getting something back. Neuro Web Design gives an excellent example of this phenomenon. Two groups are brought in for what they think is a study on creativity. “Joe”, who they think is another participant, is actually a plant. “Joe” sits in a room with another subject alone waiting for the researcher. Half of the time he offers the other participant his extra soda, half of the time he does not. At the end of the fake study on creativity, he asks the other participant if they would like to buy a $5 raffle ticket from him. Guess what? If you are one of the people that got the free soda, your are TWICE as likely to pay $5 for a raffle ticket…hardly an even trade, but when people feel social debt, they are likely to make irrational choices.

How can you apply this to your website? You can start by offering free ebooks, webinars, and articles. If you offer products, Amazon.com has clearly shown that offering free shipping and having a money back guarantee can be a huge boon.

2) Don’t Give Too Many Choices
If you have a marketing background, you may be aware of the study done by Iyengar and Lepper on jams and jellies. They setup a sample station at a local grocery store. Half the time they laid out 24 flavors of jelly to sample and half the time they laid out six samples. Only 6% of people who approached the stand when there were 24 flavors purchased…compared to 30% of people when there were only 6 choices. The lesson? Don’t overwhelm people. If you are running a service, it may be tempting to have a giant a la carte list and let people pick and choose what they want…but you will be losing business compared to offering pre-defined Platinum, Gold and Silver packages.

3) Use Fear (!)
Fear can be used in multiple ways. People are extremely risk adverse. This is why people buy health insurance. On the whole, all types of insurance are a bad deal, but if things go wrong it can be a life saver (literally!). We can use people’s risk averse nature to our advantage.

a) Make It Scarce
The easy example of people fearing they won’t get one is Apple’s release of the iPhone. They purposefully under-ship when a new model is released and stores often run out in a few days. The result? HUGE LINES. You can use this same method by stating you only have “Only Two in your size left” if you are selling clothing, or simply put time limits on your offer. People are more likely to buy if you put “Offer Ends April 1st” than if you leave the offer open ended.

b) Shoot Down Fears
A number of questions come across people’s minds when purchasing online. Is this company real? What happens if I am unhappy with the product? These all relate to trust and the fear of the unknown.  There are simple ways to fix this (that may be irrationally scary to you if your product is a good one) such as free shipping, free shipping on returns, and a 100% Money Back Guarantee. Those three offerings are the main reasons why companies like amazon.com and zappos.com have blown other online retailers out of the water AND they have become an expectation people have for your business after dealing with such companies online.

c) Use “Fear of Loss”
In 2004, Barry Schwartz did a study on car purchasing. He had half the group decide which options they wanted to add to a car with no options by default, and the other half start from the 100% souped up version and subtract options to save money. The people that had to remove options ended up spending a lot more money. Why? Once people had imagined themselves with all the cool features of the model with all the options, it was hard for them to view the version with less options as attractive. The people who started with the model with no options were already excited, adding more bells and whistles wasn’t as NEEDED by these people. How can you use this on your website? Always push your premiere service packages or products first and let people downgrade if they have to.

4) Tell Stories
What were you doing on April 16th, 2003? No idea? How about September 11th 2001? I bet you know exactly what you were doing. The human mind remembers things of emotional consequence far better than the mundane. This is one reason why story telling is so effective. By attaching real life, real people, and real emotions to your products you will 1) help people remember them a whole lot better and 2) allow them to emotionally connect with the people you are talking about through your stories. Lifelock does an amazing job with story telling on their website’s testimonials page. How can you do a better job of bringing an emotional response to your website?

Hope this article got you thinking. Interested in learning more about this kind of web design? Go ahead and ask questions in the comments below.

Website Development and Programming – I always felt that my website was in good hands with Ethan. From the beginning, he clearly explained the various options for the layout and functionality of my website. As I arrived at a concrete idea of what I wanted in the site, he worked with me over time to make sure it would be built in a way that would facilitate a professional and engaging personality for my fledgling business, as well as reminding me to consider how I would be generating revenue from the site. He took into consideration the unique aspects of my project and went above and beyond to build a site that had the features and functionality that I wanted. Many of the features I asked for were NOT easy to build, and yet he was able to do all of them – and in a very short period of time. I feel very lucky that I was able to work with him to make the site do exactly what I had envisioned it doing.

Brand, Logo, and Design – Tom was able to create an incredible, powerful, aesthetically pleasing, logo that will aid me in expanding the visibility and credibility of my business. He went through three rounds of revisions with me, and after each round he really listened to my thoughts about the different ideas he had presented and then incorporated that feedback into the next round of revisions. This allowed for a great collaborative process. His knowledge of the theory of design meant that I could bounce ideas off of him and get good guidance from him about which direction to take the design. By using both of our ideas we were able to continually refine the design concept (using his expertise) until we had created a truly spectacular logo. Then he built a perfect site design around the logo – it looks exactly how I hoped it would: professional, accessible, and easy to use.

Business Development and Strategy – It was a blessing to have Dan consulting me through the entire process of creating my business and developing my brand, as well as planning my strategy for entry into the market and building a revenue model that would be sustainable. He was familiar with every step of the process, from choosing a compelling name to searching for possible trademark overlaps to strategies for contacting advertisers. Having this kind of guidance was a relief, since these initial steps can be so stressful and have such far-reaching ramifications for the success of one’s business. Dan always was willing to listen to my concerns and gave me his best recommendations for how to proceed but always kept an open mind to any ideas I might have, even when that entailed taking a different direction that what he had in mind. Ultimately this was a very strong working relationship that yielded great results for my business.

Analytics and Social Media – One of the unique things about Earthwork Media is that each of the team members has expertise in using online tools to help a website grow quickly. These tools, such as Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Feedburner, Facebook, and Twitter are now integral parts of my business – and that’s because of the help I received from the Earthwork team in understanding how to use and implement them.

My experience with Earthwork Media could not be any more positive. I will be recommending them without hesitation to all my friends and colleagues.

Ben Feldman
CapInsider
http://www.capinsider.com

1. Clear Calls to Action
Your call (or calls, i.e. “try now” and “buy now”) to action needs to be the most obvious part of your website. Not your logo. Not the cool picture you like. Your call to action. The web is a word full of distraction and you need to get people where you want them to go as soon as possible.

2. Fresh Content at Least Once a Week
Providing new content on your site, usually through a blog, at least once a week means an average of 300% more site visits on a daily basis. 300%! If you want to increase traffic to your website, the easiest way to do it is to write a couple 200-400 word posts to your blog every week.

3. Highest Quality Professional Design
Numerous research articles have shown that the #1 factor for people in deciding whether or not your website (and hence your whole business) is trustworthy is the quality of the “look and feel”. This is particularly true for health, finance and e-commerce sites, while people are more forgiving of the “look and feel” quality of news and non-profit sites.

4. One That is Always Improving
A great website is never finished. The web gives historically unheard of tracking and testing abilities compared to any marketing medium, EVER. We can see which pages are leading to conversions, which pages cause people to leave your site, and even serve multiple versions of an individual page to test which version works better.

5. Simple Architecture
Relating to #1, keep you site as easy to navigate around as possible. Your navigation should be full of obvious navigation terms like “About”, “Services” or “Pricing”. This not only helps users find the content they actually need, it also help the search engines get a better understanding of your site and rank you higher for appropriate terms.

6. Great Copy
Oh boy. This topic is a whole book. Here are keys to remember.

1) Stay away from industry jargon unless your audience is from a particular industry. It doesn’t make you sound smart, it confuses your readers.

2) Use the appropriate vocabulary for your audience. Again, it doesn’t make you sound smart to use SAT words. You can use the Flesch-Kincad readability calculator to check out the grade level of your copy.

3) If you can use 5 words to make your point, use 5, not 40. People get bored fast.

4) Don’t list features, list solutions. An impressive list of features is well and good, but people are really looking to purchase your product or service (or donate to your campaign or whatever) to solve a problem. Address that problem, don’t expect them to connect the dots.

There are a million other aspects to great copy, but the 4 items above are a start.

7. Multiple Platform Compatibility
Your website needs to be accessible on as many screens as possible. That means making sure a version of your site loads for Internet Explorer 6 to 9, Firefox, Chome, iPhone, iPads, Android devices and more. You also need to make sure your site is coded in a way that will be compatible with screen readers for the visually-impaired…they make up more online presence than those using Internet Explorer 6! Your site doesn’t have to look 100% the same on all devices, but it can’t be broken.

8. Keep Your Forms Simple
Every extra field you ask for means less people will fill out your form. You may want to get their phone, fax, email and their college roommates name, but will that information make up for the fact that you will lose 10%, 20%, or 50% of your form fills?

9. No Need to Go Crazy
You might think a site with a conventional layout is boring. In fact, most websites are laid out very similarly for a reason…its less confusing for visitors and, hence, the natural flow of their eyes. A conventional layout decreases learning time, and has been proven to increase users trust in your site. This does not mean your design can’t be new and fresh and interesting…it just means that the menu should be where users expect it.

10. Help Users Share and Find There Way Back
Facebook, Twitter, RSS and email newsletters. These are all great and simple to implement tools to help your content spread, and help your visitors come back.

Have any other tips or questions? Go ahead and comment below!

This is a series of brief blog posts based on panels Earthwork Media visits at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. These posts are unproofed and might not follow a clear storyline depending on how organized the speakers are. They are posted within seconds of the panels ending. You can follow them all at http://earthworkmedia.com/blog/category/sxsw/

All Questions and Answers are paraphrased.

Q. Do you have any advice for companies with a lot of affiliates when they notice that their affiliates are buying links?

A. (Cutts) Link buying is bad, and as time goes on and are algorithms get better, they will hurt these site SERIOUSLY in the long run.

Q. How do you come up with appropriate punishments for things like JC Penny’s SEO cheating?
A. (Cutts) Hidden text might be 30 days. A hacked site might be 30 days. If you are doing something more serious we can punish for months and months.

Q. How do you get back into Google’s good graces?
A. (Cutts) Get a reconsideration from Google Webmaster Tools. There is also a forum. (Forrester) Pretty much the same thing. (Cutts) We don’t always show everything that is taking your site our of good graces. Obviously, we don’t want to give credit card spam artists a heads up or other malicious sites.

Q. Are press releases and adding your site to a directory OK after the DemandMedia, etc, algorithmic adjustments?
A. (Cutts) Ask yourself if your content is original. If so, sure, throw it up on a press release. (Forrester) Link building is part of marketing. It’s OK. But they have to be QUALITY links. Don’t just put your site on some link farm with no worthwhile reason. (Cutts) The key to link building is making unique, interesting content.

Q. Does age matter?
A. (Forrester) Yes. We don’t, however, look at age solely. We look at over 1000 different aspects to rank your site. (Cutts) The largest areas we use to rank are reputation and content. Reputation comes a lot from links.

Q. How about social media and search?
A. (Forrester) We do a lot of integration with Facebook and are looking to grow. (Cutts) We are doing some Twitter integration and are looking to grow.

Q. Is Google going to give you more information so we can audit our SEO teams so JC Penny doesn’t happen to us?
A. (Cutts) You currently can go ahead and get a CSV file of your inbound links. You have to monitor that, especially if you sub-contract your SEO.

Q. I’m own a .org where we post the best of poetry. How can I compete with user generated content sites with millions of bad poems?
A. (Cutts) Get your authors to link to you? If they have value as “famous” poets, it will help. (Forrester) It doesn’t take many high quality links to make a huge difference.

Q. How do I know how well I rank overall? (Location and your history and your social network change Google rankings)
A. (Cutts) It doesn’t matter. Traffic is the most important and conversion is the most important. Ranking reports are a waste.

Q. Does having a .tv domain hurt me?
A. (Cutts) .com, .net, etc doesn’t matter.

Cutts: Check out our Google Webmaster Blog. Its even better than my blog. And check out the Search Engine Master Channel. Google it to find it.

This is a series of brief blog posts based on panels Earthwork Media visits at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. These posts are unproofed and might not follow a clear storyline depending on how organized the speakers are. They are posted within seconds of the panels ending. You can follow them all at http://earthworkmedia.com/blog/category/sxsw/

Mobile application development is expensive. The average iPhone application runs around $30k. And then you have to make an Android version, and maybe a Blackberry Version. And maybe an iPad version. All of the are written in different languages with different additional features and lacking features.

This really makes mobile application development prohibitive for most people. Enter Sencha and PhoneGap. These two libraries allow you to write your apps once and either use them as a webpage (Sencha) or actually submit to the different application stores…while coding just once!

Earthwork Media is actually in the process of writing our first cross-platform application and will be adding mobile applications to our offering list very soon.

This is a series of brief blog posts based on panels Earthwork Media visits at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. These posts are unproofed and might not follow a clear storyline depending on how organized the speakers are. They are posted within seconds of the panels ending. You can follow them all at http://earthworkmedia.com/blog/category/sxsw/

• Things that go into building a site:
  • Branding
  • User experience strategy
  • Content strategy
  • Market Research
  • Content creation
  • Design
  • UX Design
  • IA Design
  • Development.