As web designers, your focus can't remain strictly on aesthetics. Functionality must be the framework of whatever you produce. If you can't get your audience to do what you intended them to do, you need to go back to the drawing board. By the way, you should expect to go back to the drawing board, but have a plan! In order to understand how to improve your site layout and your design, you'll need data, and that's where heat maps and other user activity tracking tools can come in handy.
Has your customer success team been looking for ways to improve the customer experience at your company? Between HubSpot's free CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool) and its sales, marketing, and service platforms, it could be the tool you've been looking for to take your customer experience to the next level.
See what I did there? The 5 C's of selecting photos for your site... now that they're all C's, you'll all remember them better!
I can't stress enough the importance of beginning with good content. From a design perspective, so much of the impression your online presence leaves on users depends on the imagery you select and how you use it. More often than not, clients come to us with little to no imagery for their web project. Even when they do, the odds of it being good imagery are pretty slim. Needless to say, I spend a lot of my time scouring stock photography sites searching for fantastic imagery to bring all the elements of a web masterpiece together.
Whether you're searching for imagery as a client or on behalf of a client, here are a few items to keep in mind:
![How to Achieve Client Delight [With Examples]](https://www.tributemedia.com/hubfs/Images/Blog%20Images/happy%20customer%20survey%20%281%29.jpg)
As most account managers will tell you, it's never fun to wonder if you're doing a good job at meeting client expectations. It's not that we, as account managers, feel like we're doing a BAD job. It's that it's often difficult to understand the preferences and personalities of each individual client. While one client may be quick to respond to emails, another might not have answered an email in months because they just trust you to help them meet their goals.
Last week, some of the Tribute team attended INBOUND, an annual conference in Boston filled with actionable education, endless inspiration, human connections and amazing keynote speakers. After those four and a half days of straight learning (and a bit of fun), we left Boston with over 32 pages of notes on how we could improve our client marketing strategies as well as our client experiences.
As we’re sharing these visions with the rest of our team and our clients, we wanted to touch on a few of the major takeaways that can be useful for everyone.
Years ago, I was at a conference in Orlando, Florida and happened to stay across the street from Downtown Disney. I spent each of my nights there walking around, riding the water taxi, eating dinner and just relaxing. Usually when I travel for work, it’s all about work. Rarely do I find the time to enjoy my surroundings, so this was new for me.
I started thinking a bit about what Disney knows how to do right, and that is to provide the customer an experience that they won't forget. As I sat there one evening eating dinner I realized that my reality seemed suspended for a short while.
Think about Las Vegas. Every so often, a casino will be torn down so that there can be room made for a new one. The casinos get bigger and better. Moreover, they are all designed to give the visitors an experience that is otherworldly. It’s a design that is meant to suspend reality.
Now, I can understand that people want different experiences, but which experience do you think fosters a sense of excitement for your customers? Which experience do you think causes people to tell their friends? Which experience is worth more to the consumer?
Mobile commerce is an important aspect of sales, and consumers utilize it constantly (peep the rise of Amazon and other big online retailers).
I recently read an article on 'bad' clients and the 'bad' attitudes of agencies. In reading it, I was reminded of a poignant fact that clients who are willing to pay for the expertise to solve important business challenges are often in a struggle to get a foothold in their market and increase ROI.
They can be difficult to deal with on any number of factors, but our job is to approach such clients with compassion and understanding, and in the end, to help them.
The fold. If you're a web developer, you've heard it mentioned plenty of times. Often, a client will throw the word out, having heard it somewhere in a designy context and wanting to see if it makes them sound informed. What does it mean and does it apply to web design here in 2015?
You would think the response is quick and simple, but this is a very complicated, very debated topic. Go ahead and Google it! If you do, you'll see there is a pretty even split of people who are for and against designing with the fold in mind.
Web forms on your website can be very helpful tools. They can be used to gather data about potential customers or give current customers a convenient option to ask for help. On the other hand, they can be the source of some inconveniences as well. Spam is an ever-increasing problem, and having web forms on your site is an invitation to spammers everywhere to fill your inboxes with garbage.
A spambot is an automated computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam emails or populate website forms. These programs continue to get more intelligent and now people have become a big part of spamming in recent years. Where there is cheap labor, people can be hired at an extremely low cost to do nothing but fill out forms and send emails.
