Anyone who has ever been very hands-on with creating a visitor-friendly website knows the time and detail involved. Our updates have been quiet for a while, but none-the-less progress has been steady.

Thank You for the Valuable Input!

We greatly appreciate everyone who has shared their input in creating the home page in our little social design experiment. All your comments were read and carefully considered as we finalized the design.

In trying to make the top-level entrance to Relevance Path easy to understand and navigate, there were many conflicting decisions between simplicity and “more stuff”. Because of some very helpful input, we believe a good balance was achieved that:

• Presents our value proposition quickly and clearly
• Provides options for different styles of users to find information (people who click, search, scan or read)
• Helps visitors quickly find the next click in less than 5 seconds
• Is professional, unique and pleasing to look at.

Changes

You’ll notice two major design differences from our last posting:

1. An updated company logo
2. Addition of Visual Calls-to-Action (CTA’s)

Logo Design Change

While we liked our original logo, it became increasingly clear that the design presented some challenges for online use. Most notable was the height. In order for the arrows icon (which we very much like – thank you Kriszha) not to be lost at smaller sizes, it has to maintain a minimum and rather large presence.

In vertical mode this made for a lot of extra space in the header and prevented us from using a tagline. A primary goal for design was to keep the most important and relevant content “above the fold”, or in a visitor’s view without scrolling down even if on a smaller laptop screen.

The new horizontally-oriented design helped us achieve our goals and we quite like it. An added benefit was that it presented some new, inherent flexibility for other layouts when needed for other requirements such as a twitter page design. What are your thoughts?

Visual CTA’s and Designing for Conversion

As mentioned previously, we believe that it is necessary to design for both ease-of-use and for different user styles. However, we must always keep in mind that an over-riding goal of a business is to convert new customers in order to stay in business.

Being as we are in the business of Attract and Convert, it also kind of makes sense to move visitors towards conversion opportunities whenever possible.

Hence the addition of the three visual calls-to-action or CTA images of:

1. Inbound Marketing Master Plan – an offer to help other businesses create their own Inbound Marketing plan by way of a free pdf download This will take visitors to a landing page with a form to get the download offer. There will be no obligation, but it helps us capture a lead for a potential client who may need assistance with their online marketing.
2. Free Website Evaluation – a straight-forward offer that again leads to a landing page that expands on the offer and provides multiple options to contact us.
3. We Partner with the Best – our HubSpot Certified Partner logo to provide credibility and give visitors an insight into the best inbound marketing tool on the market.

That pretty much sums up our design process for a visitor-friendly Home Page. Again, thanks to all the useful feedback and please do share your comments below. My next post will profile the design template for mobile devices – riveting stuff!

JP

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We received some fantastic feedback from Request #1 on the home page designs and, if you have not already done so, you can see our summary and response.

All comments were taken into consideration. Design #3 was chosen for the base template, but with some considerable modifications courtesy of everyone’s thoughtful insight.

Tweaking the Home Page

This feedback request revolves around some more subtle differences a single design. The two options below contain slight differences. On top of your general feedback, we’ve posted five specific questions to help guide the process. Don’t pull any punches…we want to hear the bad along with the good.

Version #1

Version #2

Questions:

1. In the main navigation bar (SOLUTIONS, INBOUND MARKETING PRIMER, etc) do you like the look of ‘ALL-CAPITALS’ or do you prefer ‘Title Case’?
2. Under “Learn More” have a look at the calls-to-action text for “Services, Contact Us, Follow Us” – does the colour contrast enough for you to notice or does it look washed out?
3. At the top of Versions 1 & 2 the contact and follow information is presented differently. Which style do you think is easiest to understand:
• Version #1 with all purple
• Version #2 with the traditional colours for social media buttons
• Would you prefer something else?
4. For the 3 service pillar columns (Getting Found, Converting Traffic, Local Search) which style do you prefer:
• Graphics in-line with the titles (Version #1)
• Graphics below titles with text beside? (Version #2)
5. Is the font size large enough for the content in the main body of the 3 service pillars?
6. General comments and feedback – tell us like it is!

Timeline: Your feedback comments are requested by 7:00 am Pacific Time on Tuesday, Oct. 4th so we can update our designers. Thanks.

We’ve received a great response to our request for feedback on our initial home page designs from friends and colleagues both through this blog and in person. There wasn’t a clear “winner” or “loser” between the designs but we weren’t expecting that there would be. All of the designs have some good elements and bad ones and this process was mostly about seeing what those were for different folks.

To sum up what we’ve learned, people definitely have (sometimes strong) opinions about what does and does not make up a quality home page. Lumped into simple categories of what people want or don’t want to see it would look something like this:

Desirable elements:

• clear message
• easy (even simple) navigation, particularly top menu items
• uncluttered
• readable font size and style
• smart and catchy
• focused
• know where to look
• dynamic
• visually easy

Undesirable elements:

• clutter
• a feeling of not knowing where to go
• text that is too small
• cartoony

Elements that seem to be a personal preference:

• colours
• layout and location of various elements (news, service pillars, contact info, etc)

The next step for us is to take the feedback that we’ve got, both in the general as well as the specific, back to our designer for improvements to the design. As far as layout goes we’re going to work with a mixture of the best parts of design #1 (clean design, easy top menus, clear message, “the favourite”) and design #3 (colours, catchy, good layout). Of course we’re going to ditch a couple things that didn’t go over very well. We’ll post the updated design(s) in a post here in the next few days.

Thanks again to everyone for their thoughtful input and I hope you share some more thoughts with us when we post the next request for feedback.

Keith

Pick Your Favourite

This is the first feedback request for Project Pathfinder, an experiment in accessing the wisdom of the crowd in our website design process.

The Big Question: Which home page design do you like better – Design 1, 2, 3 or 4? Click each for a larger view.
Ignore content and images. Focus on first impressions of design, layout and colours.

The Details: If you feel like giving more feedback, tell us why, which elements work (in any design), which don’t, what you would change, etc.

The Timeline: Feedback comments requested by 7:00 am Pacific Time on Friday, Sep. 23rd so we can update our designers.

Please post your comments below. Thanks.

Design #1

Design #2

Design #3

Design #4

We thought that you might want to know how this social web design experiment will roll out. It’s actually pretty simple. There are no contracts written in blood and you don’t have to give up your firstborn. Basically, it will go something like:

1. You’ll receive an email with a feedback question
• we’ll ONLY email if you have joined Project Pathfinder by leaving a comment on a blog post page with your email address (this page included)
• you can also subscribe to our RSS Feed
• the email will contain details on the feedback being requested, a link to the posting, PLUS a deadline for responding
• response deadlines are just so we can keep moving forward in a timely manner with our developers
2. Click the link in the email, view the details and relevant images or content on the blog post
3. Leave your feedback right in the blog post in the “Leave a Comment” section
• Note that comments are viewable by anyone reading the post, so if you are shy and want to be anonymous, just leave name blank (your email does NOT get published)
• The “Website” field in comments is there if you want to share a link to your own website

Voila! You’re finished. Check back every now and then if you want to read the comments posted or subscribe to the RSS Feed.

We’ll be reading, posting and sharing it all, so let’s have a little fun while we learn together!

The Big, Bad Disclaimer

Now, this is the tricky part….while we WANT and WELCOME all of your feedback, we can’t promise to go with the top choices. Some decisions that we make will be based on things like SEO (search engine optimization), usability and lead generation requirements. Oh ya, and on our own personal preferences being as this is our company brand being created!

That said, we know that there is strength and, hopefully, wisdom in numbers which is why your opinion matters.

Have questions? Leave a comment below!

JP & Keith

Have Fun. Learn about Inbound Marketing. Get Free Stuff!

Help Us Build a Killer Website

J.P. Obbagy and Keith Haberl welcome you to join us in a little social experiment as we design a new website for Relevance Path Inbound Marketing. It’s a boutique Internet Marketing Agency that helps small and mid-sized businesses:

1. Get found by more customers online
2. Convert more online visitors to high quality leads and/or sales.

We launched Relevance Path back in March of 2011, immediately got busy with some great customers and haven’t had the time to get our own site up. It’s a good problem to have, but it’s also a bit of an issue seeing how our business is being experts in things Internet.

Have Fun Building a Brand

So, how do you have fun and get free stuff? It’s super easy; just give us a little feedback every now and then as we go through the website design and content creation process. The fun part comes from seeing something grow organically with community input and by sharing and reading the public comments.

Get Some Free Stuff

And the FREE STUFF? If you have a website, we’ll send you a free website grader report to show where you are doing well and where you can improve in getting more traffic and customers from your site (no strings attached). You’ll also get five original blog post ideas to help increase your businesses value to potential customers.

If you’re not keen on the website report, we’ll enter you in a draw for a $100 gift certificate for original t-shirts from Threadless.com (a favourite of JP).

Easy to Do and Low Time Commitment

Your part is REALLY easy. Just vote or give us feedback when we post a new design option or piece of content that we’re considering for our website. Our goal is simple: to create a site that people like, is simple to navigate and explains clearly what we do.

Sign Me Up!

Actually, no sign-up required. WE WILL NOT SPAM YOU! Just leave a comment on the appropriate post and you’re a part of our design team. Name, email and website address are all optional and not required for comments. Email addresses are NOT displayed. Make sure to check the “Notify me” box if you want to receive updates.

Just Leave a Comment to Participate

Name and email are only needed if:

1. You want to receive updates by email when there is a new blog post or feedback request.
2. You want to be included in the offers for a free website grader AND draw for the $100 Threadless t-shirt.

Thank you and well, thank you!

JP & Keith