Rewards and Achievements

When someone visits your website they tend to be rather selfish, (subconsciously, of course). They look around and try to determine what the purpose of the website is and how they can benefit from the content. If the user gains something from the experience then they are more likely to return.

If you regularly visit design blogs then you will notice that giveaways are a common occurrence throughout the community. A few people who enter, may revisit the website to have a look around but it is almost assured that your traffic will resume to its original state once the competition has ended.

Now the trick in giving things away or rewarding users is to never stop giving and rewarding. Competitions are great but once they end, they end. If you had a competition to win $2000, you would no doubt get a lot of traffic your way (so long as your marketing is up to par) but once you’ve given the $2000, traffic is likely to resume as normal. If you gave the $2000 away every time a user commented or posted in the forums, then almost everybody would keep returning. Now because you have removed the idea of losing, you are giving the user a win win situation. Thus, you can reduce the amount given away to $200, or $20, or even $2.

You will find that you don’t even need to give something of monetary value away to entice users to return. For example, look at Xbox live, people complete challenges to achieve a certain badge to impress their friends. So long as there is always something to achieve, there will always be competition and so users will replay the game again and again. Another example closer to home is the badges used in the Envato Marketplace forums. Now I don’t use the forums but I’ve heard that users almost go out of their way to acquire a badge (a tiny little image) for their profile.

But what if you’re not a major brand – just a small online service provider? While failed projects and disastrous clients are unlikely to spread the word as far, they’re just as likely to cause a great deal of damage to your business. From minor fallouts to projects that didn’t quite go as planned, there are hundreds of reasons for formerly solid client relationships to turn sour.

We’ve prepared this guide to help you respond to such situations. With Google’s dynamic search results pushing “scam” terms to the top of the ranks and speculation-friendly social media outlets giving almost any disgruntled client an outlet, monitoring your online buzz is more important than ever. These five strategies can help you keep your name under control, and keep your clients from turning against you.

Offer alternatives, new solutions, and even a discount.

Managing problematic clients is an art that requires practice. It’s also something that requires a reasonable understanding of trade-offs and sunk costs. If a project has gone poorly and ended in what could become public criticism, you’re faced with two possible choices as a service provider.

The first is to leave it be, pushing your client towards other providers and increasing the chances that you’ll end up with a very public negative testimonial. The second option is to offer a solution to clients in private, extending your service and possibly missing out on such a lucrative project payment.

It’s up to you to decide between the two, but we think it’s worth preserving your name in exchange for a slight hit in your company’s bottom line. If you’re forced into a position where a dispute could result in negative feedback and a search-friendly public posting, offer a discount on the project or eliminate costs altogether. It will hurt in the short-term and you’ll likely lose any future business, but it’s certainly more welcome than a smear post or high-ranked “scam” forum topic.

Have your own public outlet prepared.

Don’t have a blog? Start one. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to challenge most companies on their promises, not due to a devaluing of opinions but because of the huge increase in company blogs over the last few years. Businesses that were once uninterested in blogging and unresponsive to public criticism have taken a different stand, posting weekly to keep a public outlet open.

That one blog can be the difference between a very public fallout and a reasoned response to criticism. With the anonymous nature of the internet and the occasionally shady tactics of many online workers, it’s inevitable that you will one day attract public criticism, particularly if you operate a large business or work with hundreds of different clients.

Prevent that criticism from being the only post on you or your company by building your own public outlet. All it takes is a single blog post weekly – something that takes less than ten minutes and has its own set of promotional benefits. Control your own outlet and you’ll be prepared for criticism and public disputes, both in the blogosphere and in the search results.

Respond to blog posts, “rip-off” reports, and forum bashing carefully.

Not every critical blog post deserves a response. Major companies and in-demand online presences often selectively ignore unfair criticism of themselves, instead choosing to focus on their goals and respond to complaints that are justified. It’s a situation that’s difficult to navigate – when trolls post unfair and inaccurate opinions on your business, many people can take them at face value.

But responding to trollish, untrue comments can sometimes make a bad situation worse. When the complaint is based on nothing but hearsay and anger, a reasoned response can often just ignite fires and push more people to post unfair criticism. The United States Air Force has a ‘counter-blog‘ chart which we’re big fans of – it demonstrates how to respond to the right criticism, and why you should ignore criticism that’s not grounded in reality.

Fire your problem clients.

Some clients aren’t going to love your service, no matter how great it may be. They’re a type that’s present in every form of business, complaining that extra features aren’t the norm and continually bartering for a discount. It’s tempting to cater to problem clients and offer discounts to cut down could-be controversy, but doing so leaves you in an annoying and financially difficult position.

Marketing expert and ultra-blogger Seth Godin made the same point in a recent blog post, stating that you can “put up with the whiners, write off everyone, or, deliberately exclude the ungrateful curs.” We agree with him – it’s best to tailor your business to the clients that bring you more than just long-term projects and income, and eliminate those that could lead to issues.

So take a more forward stance to could-be problem clients, and work them out of your portfolio before they grow to be an annoyance. Some service providers and consultants recommend using your prices to drive away problematic clients, but we think it’s best to just close the door entirely. Eliminate problem clients before they produce crises and you’ll have more time to focus on those that your business meshes with.

Don’t astroturf: make it clear who you are and why you’re defending yourself.

The only thing more damaging to your business than an anonymous complaint is an anonymous complaint with a very suspicious ultra-positive response. With most online complaint boards open to almost anyone, users have grown conditioned to think that anyone singing a company’s praises must be a paid shill.

Don’t fight it – there’s no way to overcome online conditioning and the way people respond to controversy. Instead, be completely open about your affiliation or ownership with the business in question, and explain exactly why you’re responding to any public criticism. Users aren’t against service providers and businesses from the get-to, they just like their information free of bias and false impartiality.

Preventative action: 3 ways to keep your company’s online image dispute-free.

Responding is one thing – actively monitoring is another. We’ve picked out three strategies that can help you keep your online reputation clean and criticism-free. Think of public responses and visible explanations as a last case scenario, and use these tools and tactics to ensure that you’re never put in a position where it’s a necessity.

1. 1. Use Google Alerts to keep track of your trading name

Google Alerts should be one of the most frequently used tools in any freelancer’s arsenal. Both an amazing marketing tool and an incredibly effective service for reputation management, it’s one of the most immediately accessible tools out there for searching the internet for your name (or your business name) and monitoring the conversation.

If you’re in high demand, set a daily reminder and check over the results once every evening. Small businesses and freelancers can get by with once-weekly alerts, which should be configured to email information on their competition, client reviews and public forum posts, and any potential clients with an interest in their services.

1. 2. Reach out to clients in private if you feel things could turn sour

Never make things public if your name is at stake. Every designer has run into at least one dispute with a client, sometimes over the most minor and inconsequential of details. Even if you feel as if you’re being unfairly targeted or treated poorly, don’t take the matter public unless you’re forced to.

Reach out to troubled clients and offer them a solution via email, phone, or an instant messenger. As tempting as it may be to name and shame a problematic client, it reflects poorly on your business to release details of a client’s requests to the public. Aim for private solutions, and let disputes become public only once you’ve exhausted any private options for reconciliation.

1. 3. Control your search results using social media outlets

Every online business should aim to control their first-page search results. Not the results for their industry, but the results for their trading name, or for freelancers their full name. It’s an exercise that takes surprisingly little effort (unless you’re called John Smith) and is immensely rewarding when it comes to reputation management and handling online disputes.

Start with the top spot – one that should be inhabited by your own website – and work your way downwards with social media outlets and other small websites. Controlling your name has obvious benefits when it comes to your online reputation, and it’s also an indispensable method for helping potential clients find your business when referred to you by a trading name.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and let us know when you’ve been in a situation like this and how you handled it.

Images by ShutterStock

For this post, I’m going to share with you a couple of tips on how to write great headlines that not only pokes the curious cat in you but that makes a lot of sense when you use it.

1. Practice Writing Short Headlines and Titles

One of the prominent goals when setting up a website is to attract readers or “visitors” online, and readers nowadays run away from very long titles or headlines.  To prevent this from happening, practice writing headlines and titles that are at least 5-7 words long, catchy, and that are likely to be found when a person searches for your article through the search engine.  For added value, ask a friend or a writing expert to check which of your headlines or titles work best with your choice of an article.

2. What Would You Write in the Search Engine?

One of the best ways to figure out which words to use for your title or headlines (especially when you have the search engines in mind) is to put yourself in the visitor’s shoes.  What would a typical visitor from your target audience type in the search engines when looking for an article that tackles your topic?  Would he write “building a website tips” when looking for website tutorials or “awesome solutions to make your website stand out”?  Obviously the former is a much better choice since it summarizes the topic almost completely.

3. Proofread Your Headlines and Titles To Perfection

People nowadays disregard the importance of proper capitalization when writing titles and headlines, thinking that no one would care about how they look since they prioritize the content more.  While this may be true since the source of information is in the body of the article, readers do get turned off by bad capitalization and unnecessary punctuation.  There are plenty of grammar books, articles, and blogs online that could review you on this so give yourself time to learn, review, and polish those titles and headlines the right way.

4. Your Headline or Title Should Summarize the Content

Though a headline or a title must be catchy, clever, and witty in order to grab the visitor’s attention by the horns, it sure won’t attract the search engines that much.  The best way to do this is to choose a headline or title that can summarize your article or your website while maintaining its impact on readers.  For example, if you’re writing about tips on how to blog for money, you can title your article as “6 Tips to Earning Money from Blogging” or “6 Blogging Tips to Make Money Online”.  As a reader, you’ll immediately know the gist of the article that you’re about to click to when you read these titles for the first time.

5. Play Your Words Right

Being the creative writers that we are, sometimes we allow ourselves to play with words too much that we forget who we are writing for.  We start to forget that we’re writing website content, not literature that you normally use for books or scholarly journals.  Combining creativity and practicality is difficult, but if you know how to play your words right you’ll be able to write titles and headlines that are not only creatively clever but digestible for your readers as well.

Start by using simple and straight-to-the point words and phrases that even a 5th grader can understand.  These words should then be strung creatively into a headline or title so that it not only makes sense but is clever enough to make people want to click it.  It’s a skill that cannot be learned overnight so practice and getting feedback from peers are the best ways to hone this skill in the shortest period of time.

More Value to Your Website

By perfecting your ability to write great titles and headlines for your websites, your website will not only possess design and illustrations that can wow people but will be of great value to readers everywhere.  So the next time you decide to post an article, tutorial, or create a new web page for your site, never take your headline and title-writing skills for granted when you know it can increase your chances of boosting traffic significantly.

Images by ShutterStock

Not always. As tempting as those six-figure design budgets and large projects may be, the majority of big business design contracts tend to fall into the hands of an in-house design team. With a huge number of designers desperate for work, mega-corporations and once lucrative sources of work just aren’t that interested in working with another firm anymore, preferring to manage design internally.

While this may seem like a problem, it’s left one small but equally lucrative web design field wide open: local web design. Despite being less glamorous and much less fun to dream about, local web design is just as much of an opportunity for freelancers and small design firms as a large company can be.

These seven tactics can help you expand your local client network, gain more design contracts, and become the go-to service provider in your area for web design. Not all are based online either, so it may be worth dusting off your business attire (you do own a collared shirt, don’t you) and meeting with prospective clients directly.

Remember that offline businesses are marketed to all the time.

If you’re ever been rebuffed by a local business owner, don’t take it personally. Most small business owners are approached – either directly or through mail – very often, leaving them with little time for proposals and limited patience for service providers and firms promising new business.

The key in marketing to local businesses rests in being different – being a Purple Cow. Pitching the benefits of a website isn’t particularly difficult, but empathizing with a local business owner can be. Adjust to working slowly and remember that you’re not the only person offering a service, though you could be the only person offering a web design service.

Track down the local chamber of commerce and other small business organizations.

Want to gain an instant point of connection with local business owners? Attend a meeting with your local chamber of commerce. Whether you live in a small town or a major city, it’s highly likely that your area is home to at least one small business organization or business development club.

Join the group for a meeting to explain how your services can help them and you’ll gain an instant point of reference to use in future pitches and negotiations. We’ve found that businesses rarely work with designers directly from meetings, but they do use them as a networking point and a chance for building new connections. This risk-free strategy can help you gain important connections into local business circles – perfect for gaining referral business in the future.

Search locally and tailor emails to each prospective client.

The easiest businesses to market web design services to aren’t those without a website, but those with an old, outdated, and ineffective website. They’re the type of businesses that understand how valuable an effective web presence can be – after all, they had a decent looking website in 2002.

Finding these businesses is simple, just search “city + industry” in Google and you’ll be inundated with ugly small business websites. Track down their contact details and offer to improve their web presence, improving their search placement in the process. Most outdated local websites are built with minimal attention to SEO, giving your design work noticeable benefits for their visibility as well as their brand.

Direct mail isn’t dead, it’s just incompatible with spam.

If there’s one marketing method that feels stone age for designers, it’s direct mail. We’re accustomed to contacting clients online, managing projects through email, and competing for projects on search engines and design directories. But as archaic as direct mail can feel, it’s a very effective way to get the attention of local businesses, provided you give it the right treatment.

Never treat direct mail as you would an email list. Those mailing list titles, vague subject lines, and general emails may be effective with established clients and tech-savvy contacts, but they’re likely to be filed as junk by local businesses. Remember our first point – local businesses are marketed to all the time – and treat your mail messages as you would a personal introduction, not a casual quote.

Cold calling? Sell on the benefits of a new website, not the website itself.

Cold introductions certainly aren’t for the faint hearted, but they can be fantastic for generating local business and expanding your network of region-specific clients. They’re also a great way of learning to face rejection well – seeing your Adwords advertisements ignored is one thing, but being hung up on really hurts.

The hardest part of marketing to local businesses is realizing that many of them don’t understand the value of a website. Small businesses are accustomed to generating sales locally, leading to suspicion whenever a new way of generating business is offered. Whenever you pitch to a local client that’s unfamiliar with the internet, stress the benefits of a website, not the website itself.

Small businesses understand referrals. Make sure you ask for them.

Local businesses may not understand the value of a website, but they do understand the value of referral business. No matter what their industry or who their sales base may be, it’s highly unlikely that your offline clients will keep to themselves about who they’re getting services from and how effective they’re proving to their business.

Tailor your service around referral business and you’ll find yourself generating clients from design contracts that happened years ago. While it’s slightly tacky (albeit effective) to ask your clients for referrals outright, it’s easy to let them know they’re welcome – add a small notice to the bottom of your invoices, or even suggest discounted services in exchange for their recommendation.

Never underestimate the value of being approached. Be visible in local search and you’ll get clients contacting you.

Is your design agency listed locally? With a focus on international contracts and large clients, it’s easy to forget that a huge number of could-be clients are searching for designers locally. A small city may have its own thriving web design local results page – an outlet that’s often packed with your competitors and ripe with opportunity for your agency to dominate.

Designers that work from an office space can list their business address on Google Places, securing a spot on local map listings and opening another outlet for generating local business. It’s quite scary how often simple marketing methods like a local listing are passed over by designers that deal with online clients, especially once you see how many clients a map listing can generate.

Recommended Resources:

Find Your Local Chamber of Commerce: Search through American chamber of commerce groups and small business organizations. Limited to American cities only, however a number of websites offer a similar international service.

Yellow Pages: If you’re contacting local businesses directly, the Yellow Pages can be a surprisingly useful tool. Look for businesses that have a phone number listed but no website – they’re likely to be interested in extending their online visibility with a website.

Images by ShutterStock

Together with the growth of Twitter, there are many tools and services developed overtime and in this article, I want to show you the most popular Twitter tools that will help you becoming a social networking guru.

Find friends to follow and be followed

1. Mr Tweet

Mr Tweet is a service that help you to find the most famous person in your niche topic based on the keyword, with Mr Tweet you could create your own community or just shared your buddies with the world.

2. Brand Chirp

BrandChirp is the solution for brand management on Twitter. Effectively monitor, manage and resolve all brand activity. Establish new connections and reach a bigger, audience with our one of a kind target follow feature.

3. We Follow

Wefollow is the most easy to use service, all you need to do is typing your keyword and let’s Wefollow find the most suitable people for you.

4. Twitter Friends Network Browser

Twitter Friends Network Browser is an interesting tools that let’s you see all of your friends, the friends of your friends and the continuous friends of them… You just put in your Twitter username and let’s everything going.

5. Friend or Follow

Friend or Follow will find out who’s not following you back on Twitter, who are you not following back and who are your mutual friends.

6. Featured Users

Featured Users is a Twitter application ad network. If you’re a Twitter user, it’s a great way to get more Twitter followers and support your favorite Twitter apps, it supports Twitter application developers, get more Twitter followers and promote your brand or services.

7. Tweepler

Tweepler Is an easy, more enjoyable way of processing your New Twitter Followers. View a list of New Followers and classify them in one of two “Buckets” Follow (meaning you wish to follow them back) and Ignore (meaning you don’t wish to follow them and want to archive them out of the way, reducing clutter).

8. TwitterTroll

TwitterTroll is a Twitter search engineer and it will tell you who are talking about the specific topic based on your search keyword and it’s a best way for you to find new friends.

9. Refollow

Refollow helps you discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle. The services has many best features like: Manage your Friends and Followers, group by Relationships, sort by Importance, discover Relevant Users, Filter Irrelevant Users.

10. Twitdir

Twitdir is a Twitter directory that store information about top 100 followed, top 100 updaters, top 100 favouriters and top 100 followers in entire Twitter network.

11. Just Tweet It

Just Tweet It was created to make it easier for people using the popular micro-blogging service Twitter to find other ìTweetersî with similar interests.

12. Twellow

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you.

13. Twitaholic

Twitaholic tracks the most popular users of a certain social network and shows you top 100, 200, 300 twitter users (based on their followers).

14. Twitter Poster

TwitterPoster is a visual application based on Twitter API. It provides a visual representation of the degree of influence of the Twitter users.

15. Nearby Tweets

Nearby Tweets is a geography-centric Twitter tool (localizing Twitter) for social networking, building customer relationships, and monitoring real-time buzz

Improve your Twitter page

16. The Twit Cleaner

The Twit Cleaner does: analyses the people you follow, finds time wasters, spammers, the boring, bots etc; creates a detailed report of everyone you’re following, increases the authenticity of your brand or personal image…

17. Twuffer

Twuffer (a Twitterô buffer) allows the Twitter user to compose a list of future tweets, and schedule their release.

18. Twittercal

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client.

19. TweetLater

TweetLater has many services that every Twitter user needs: auto create welcome messages to new followers, automatically follow people (new followers) who follow you. The services is not just for Twitter but also Buzz, Facebook, StatusNet, Ping.fm…

20. Twitter Dmer

As of now we’ve been using simple, spammy-looking direct messages to get in contact with most of our new followers on Twitter. However, with Twitter DMer, you can now make each of your DMs unique by specifying specific user details to use.

21. TwitPic

TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter, you just login to Twitpic with your Twitter username and password and you are all set

22. Twt Poll

Create your online poll with Twitter services, also you could try twtsurvey to create the survey, twtaway to run a Twitter Giveaway, TwtFAQ to create the twitter customer support service, Twtjobs a simple career manager twitter app…

23. Twit Wall

With TwitWall, you can embed your favorite videos and widgets, upload your photos, mp3 music or podcasts, – you name it. Just the kind of stuff to keep your followers following (fans cheering, or clients calling). All that, while still enjoying the many social-goodness and customization features you enjoy on Twitter.

24. Group Tweet

GroupTweet turns a standard Twitter account into a group communication hub where members can post updates to everyone in the group using direct messages. When the group account receives a direct message from a group member, GroupTweet converts it into a tweet that all followers can see.

25. Backupify

Backupify provides daily automatic backups, archiving, and export for all your social media and SaaS data such as: Gmail, Twitter, WordPress blog, Facebook…

26. Twitter Counter

Send an email to your twittermail address and Twitter Counter’ll post it to twitter, being featured on all Twitter Counter’s pages gets you a lot of visibility and followers and can be an easy way to grow your online popularity.

27. Tweet Beep

TweetBeep will keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates.

28. Twitsay

Twitsay is an amazing Twitter service that record your voice and then play it back on your Twitter page, all of your followers will hear it too!

29. Tiny Chat

Tinychat is a dead-simple audio and video web communication platform.
Tinychat provides users the choice of creating disposable or permament video conference rooms. They all have a simple url and capacity for up to 400 participants and 12 live audio video streams.

30. Twit Cam

Twitcam posts your video description and link to Twitter for all your followers to see. While broadcasting, you can chat with your viewers via Twitter right from your broadcast page.

Twitter Statistics

31. Chirp Stats

Chirpstats.com is a Twitter follower analytics package built to help you track and learn more about your follower-base. To use chirpstats, simply follow @chirpstats on Twitter and it will message you with your first update in a couple of days.

32. Tweet Stats

With tweetstats, you simply put your Twitter username and then it will show you the number of tweets per hour, per month or timeline

33. Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded.
Just enter your twitter username (password not needed) and you’ll get an instant grade and report. No muss, no fuss.

34. Tweet Volume

Put in few of your keywords and Tweet Volume will count how many times that keywords appeared on Twitter.

35. Twitter Analyzer

Twitter Analyzer Is The Most Advanced Twitter Analytic System and it’s my love tool because it provide my Twitter Statistics in most of aspects.

Twitter Trends, Topics and Searching

36. Tweetmeme

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.

37. Topsy

Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesnít think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations.

38. Whos Talkin

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

39. Trendistic

Trendistic is another Twitter search based tool that acts the same function like Topsy.

40. Twitscoop

Twitscoop is a real-time visualisation tool which enables users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. This application detects growing trends in real-time, identifies breaking news (earthquakes, plane crashes, political events, new tech products etc.)

Twitter on Mobile

41. Echofon

Echofon is a clean iPhone Twitter app with push notifications and unread tweet syncing with your computer.

42. Tweetie

Tweetie offers the most polished mobile Twitter experience around: handle multiple Twitter accounts, explore all of Twitter, from your own timeline and mentions, to the favorite tweets of your followers and friends

43. Brizzly

Brizzly brings the best Twitter experience on the web to the iPhone! Check multiple Twitter accounts, view explanations for trending topics, share photos and more.

44. OpenBeak

OpenBeak is mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don’t need to use SMS. OpenBeak is the evolution of TwitterBerry, and gives a name that allows the app to grow beyond both the Twitter platform and BlackBerry smartphones.

45. Dial2do

Dial2do is a handfree assistance allows you to stay connected to your favorite services while you drive, just using your voice.

Other stuffs

46. Tweetdeck

TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with whatís happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more.

47. Twittad

Twittad is the most effective form of sponsored advertising on Twitter by placing ads on your Twitter page background.

48. Twhirl

Twhirl is a desktop client for social software such as Twitter, Friendfeed, identi.ca, or seesmic.

49. Twittload

Update your Twitter status and share files with your friends.

50. Twittonary

The Twitter Dictionary aka Twittonary provides explanations of various Twitter related words. You can search the entire Twitter Dictionary or by single word using their letter of the alphabet.

The internet may have changed completely over the years, but the evolution sure didn’t leave out the people who used it.  Readers who browse, read, and gather information online are different now in terms of how they view content online and what they consider as ‘useful’ and ‘interesting’.  Because of this, it is important for you to gauge just how effective your site’s content really is and to do as much as you can with it to make it more useful to your visitors.

After almost two years of writing content for the web, I’ve come up with 5 essential tips that will guide you when crafting your web content.

1. Cut the Sugar Coating Out

If you’re prone to writing sentences with a lot of adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, idioms, and all that it’s time to cut it out.  Research has shown that you’re given only a couple of seconds to catch a person’s attention before they decide to skip, scroll down, scan, and leave your website.  Prevent this from happening to you by writing content using words even your mother can understand.

2. Maximize your Bullets, Numbering, and Subsections

Your content needs to be easy to digest because lengthy paragraphs can overwhelm your readers.  You can achieve this by formatting your content with bullets, numbering, and subsections.  If you have a paragraph that’s too long to swallow, cut it up properly and see if you can insert a bulleted or numbered list.  If you think a subsection will help introduce your readers to a new paragraph, go ahead and <h3></h3> it!

3. Place your Media in the Right Areas

This usually depends on your personal preferences so establish a style when inserting media into your content.  Do you prefer the photo to be centered above the corresponding paragraph or right beside it?  Do you find it more effective to place a video clip or will a quotation do?  Knowing how to place your media in the right areas of your content will bring in a lot of benefits, one of which is a stream of engaged readers.

4. Check your Spelling and Grammar Before Publishing

I’ve  come across a lot of websites that publish but forget to check the spelling and grammar of the content at all.  Do not fail to proofread and constantly update/edit your content so that you won’t turn your audience off (especially those who are spelling and grammar specialists).  If you can’t find the time to do so, hire an editor to pull out the weeds and replace them with the right kind of flowers.

5. Know Who You’re Talking To

This is one of the most important tips when writing website content, which is why I placed it at the bottom for finality.  You write because you’re addressing an issue, problem, or are sharing information to a particular audience.  How will you effectively do this if you don’t have any idea who you’re catering to?  A simple example would be a website made for teenagers.  Would you use professional content or simple content with a touch of teen language?  Of course not. So do your research and know who exactly you are talking/selling to.

Take these 5 essential tips as reminders whenever you’re revamping your web copy or improving your blog’s content.  Keep in mind who your audience is, be straight-to-the-point, and don’t forget to spell and grammar check before publishing.

Do you have more ideas about writing effective web content?  Share them in the comments below!

Images by ShutterStock

Trends are not necessarily of huge importance but if you stick to them, there is a strong chance your design will look aesthetically pleasing. Of course you can always try and aim for a timeless design, take the Coca Cola logo for example, but please remember it’s impossible to predict what the future will bring so spending hours and hours trying to make a design timeless will prove difficult (if not impossible).

Nonetheless I feel it is fun to keep up with the latest trends, and to see where the community is driving design. In this post I shall be sharing a few trends that I have recently discovered. Most are usually initiated by top designers with their followers simply copying their designs. Others maybe that little bit more creative and so spread by themselves. Anyway without further ado, the trends:

Vintage

I feel there has been a rise in vintage style design. What makes a design vintage? Well I think the key is to use patterns, textures and unique typography. Liam Mckay has been an avid user of textures and patterns, he even released a free brush set containing various subtle textures. I think the design cubicles’s redesign really set the ball rolling. It demonstrated the strength of the vintage style and how it was very unique compared to the clean style of design  that we have been seeing for years.

You can see with the redesign of the Design Informer that Jad decided to go with the vintage approach:

What followed alongside the vintage style was the patterned shadow which you can see in the logo of TDC which is now being used in every other vintage design. What resulted of the trend was a simple tutorial on dribble by Sacha Grief.

Three Dimensional Elements

Another trend emerging is giving elements that extra dimension. Buttons are becoming more like buttons, that are pressed down and released. Rogie King took a shot at the style over on Dribbble and got a pleasant response.

The only other place I had seen this style of design was at Bjango:

I liked the style so much I even implemented it on my own site. The technique is easy to achieve, by adding a simple drop shadow x amount of pixels 90 degrees below an element with zero blur, you will have your 3D look and feel.

Webkit Animations

The third trend revolves around webkit. Even though webkit has been around for years, only recently has it made its way on to our browsers. With the simplistic transition and animation features many designs and developers have been adding little webkit animations to their design.

From the simple, slow hover transition for a link to full blown animations, the webkit animation attributes are just as powerful as the ever popular jQuery library. By far the best example of this trend has to be on the Apple website.

Apple demonstrate what can be done with webkit and have definitely inspired me to experiment further. Now although only users with the latest Browsers will be able to view the animations, it adds a little something to the design. The design still functions without the animations, however the experience is made more enjoyable for those users regularly updating their browsers.

Conclusion

Well there you have it a few trends currently emerging. When you start your next design why not try implementing one of the trends above. Not only will the design look amazing but it will be received well by the design community.

We think it’s something that goes beyond the interface and questionable increase in stability – Macs do have a great assortment of design applications. These fifteen applications are our personal picks, reflecting the best of what Mac OSX has to offer designers, developers, and online workers.

Note: Obvious picks like Photoshop, Illustrator, and other Adobe applications have been left out of our roundup. It’s not that we don’t like Adobe (we’re not Steve Jobs), just that we’d prefer to support smaller application developers and suggest less obvious software.

1. Automator

Automator could be the computing world’s simplest robotic assistant. Designed to complete basic and repetitive tasks without endless coding, it’s one of the most user-friendly automation apps out there. Describe basic tasks in text, use the application’s built-in automation settings, or simply record yourself completing a task and Automator will copy the task for future use.

We like using Automator for repetitive and time consuming tasks – cropping images, saving media, and searching for specific files in Finder. Spend enough time learning how to use Automator and it’s highly likely you’ll run into ways it can optimize the way you work, saving you hundreds of hours each year that would otherwise be wasted on thankless and repetitive tasks.

2. ScreenFlow

Want to guide users through a tutorial, create a promotional video, or record an interview for your blog? ScreenFlow is a simple screen capture application that gives Mac users the ability to record and save their on-screen activities without endlessly having to adjust settings or wait for footage to save to disc.

Sounds pretty standard, right? What separates ScreenFlow from other screen capture applications is its powerful editing suite. After you’ve captured on-screen video, the app’s editor lets users highlight foreground windows, blur out unnecessary background details, and add on-screen information to their video. It’s free to try and $99 to buy, but believe us when we say it’s worth it.

3. TextMate

Need to code? TextMate is our preferred text coding tool – it’s simple, incredibly user-friendly, and one of the most intuitive hand coding applications available on any operating system. The program itself is equal parts text application and GUI, giving developers and old fashioned designers a wide range of options for completing their projects.

What makes it better than Apple’s own TextEdit? First, it’s great for highlighting and differentiating between on-page tags and different code snippets. Second, it has one of the most effective and quick searching tools we’ve found on any text editor. Finally, it’s good for more than just handwritten code and development projects – we could quite happily use TextMate for notes and rough documents.

4. Pixelmator

Photoshop is expensive. GIMP is ugly. Pixelmator, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful and inexpensive image editing applications to hit the Mac, and it’s damn powerful to boot. Unlike other cross-platform apps which use the Mac’s hardware as a secondary feature, Pixelmator is built from the ground up for Mac hardware, blending in effortlessly with Spotlight and other Mac-only applications.

It’s a steal for designers too, priced at just $59 and inclusive of free updates. While we could never give up on Photoshop for image editing and site design, Pixelmator certainly is tempting. The app itself is absolutely beautiful, providing designers with plenty of inspiration while they’re working.

5. Airlock

Airlock isn’t an essential app for designers, but it is pretty cool. This micro-application lets iPhone users lock their Mac automatically when they walk away from it using the phone’s Bluetooth signal as a proximity guide. Configure the app properly and you can lock Mac OSX once you move fifteen meters back, or even set up Airlock to require a password once you lean back in your chair.

It’s surprisingly accurate, and certainly a cool application for extra security. Designers with a home office probably won’t be all that interested in Airlock, but those stuck in a shared office space could be; the app could prevent unwanted computer use and keep your designs a little more confidential.

6. MAMP

MAMP is one of the most useful Mac applications out there for designers. An abbreviated form of “Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP,” this app lets designers and developers set up a local server for testing, tweaking, and optimizing their websites, online applications, or server databases.

We’re big fans of MAMP – it’s one of the best apps out there for working on design projects without an active connection. Whether you need to modify a WordPress theme on the go or simply test your website without fear of crippling the server, this is the app to do it in. MAMP itself is free of charge, while its bigger brother MAMP Pro is available from $49.

7. LaunchBar 5

Don’t like searching? Launchbar 5 is one of the few apps that improves on Snow Leopard’s already impressive search features. Install it and you’ll be hit with one of the most versatile productivity and file management platforms out there – LaunchBar gives users complete access to Quick Look, their favorite applications, and search options for their clipboard history and system files.

It’s one of those applications that seem unnecessary, right until you install it. If you’re accustomed to wasting time switching between applications and searching for development data, install LaunchBar and enjoy quick, simple, and effortless productivity.

8. Snippet

With Automator on your side, coding becomes quicker. With Automater and Snippet installed on your Mac, coding becomes effortlessly smooth and amazingly fast, leaving you with more time to spend on projects and less time spend wading through lines of PHP and Javascript. Priced at $12.95 and available as a free trial, we don’t doubt this app will quickly become any coder’s favorite.

Snippet is a simple app that holds snippets of your code, leaving you able to quickly search for and grab the most frequently used parts of your Javascript, PHP, or CSS projects. Bring it up by hitting Ctrl + S and Snippet’s menu will appear, giving you a list of oft-used code phrases and snippets to use for web development, application development, or CSS modifications.

9. xScope

xScope is one of those apps that should install automatically once you start a design project. The app itself is a simple and highly useful collection of design and project double-checking utilities, including a series of on-screen rulers for checking that designs are smooth and in synch, a screen resolution tester for testing websites on different monitor sizes, and a color checker.

But there’s more to xScope than just checking projects before completion. The application is built for designers and web developers that are tired of wasting time recording information by hand. If you want to minimize the amount of time spent checking over specific details and recording site information, xScope is worth its meager $27 purchase price.

10. Flow or Cyberduck

Every developer needs a go-to file transfer application, and Mac users have two excellent and very different choices. Flow is the first – a file transfer application that’s stunningly beautiful, powerful enough for most design and development tasks, and compatible with all major web protocols. It’s priced at $25 and worth every penny, provided you’re the type that prefers a great interface to an endless list of features.

The second option is Cyberduck – a versatile, powerful, and surprisingly usable open source FTP application. If you’re less concerned with pure usability and more interested in power, compatibility, and all-round usage, we’d give Cyberduck the recommendation. As an open source application it’s free of charge, although the developers would surely welcome a donation.

11. ShoveBox

There are plenty of productivity applications out there for Mac users, most of which are loaded with excess features and bloated to the point of worthlessness. ShoveBox is the exact opposite – a clean and simple note taking tool that lets designers, developers, and online workers quickly store and reference important data, images, and entire websites.

If you need to take hundreds of small minor notes each week, incorporate Shovebox into your work strategy and watch previously wasted time reappear. It’s our favorite all-purpose productivity app for the Mac because of its simplicity – users can drag information to ShoveBox without any extra commands or wasted time. Check out the website and you’ll find a 30-day trial, with options to purchase for $24.95.

12. Blinksale

Professionalism is everything when you’re a designer, especially if you want to position yourself as a premium provider and a leading design firm. While Paypal invoices and rough emails are enough for your minor clients and close friends, it’s worth investing in a proper invoicing application when billing to major clients and large companies.

Blinksale is our personal favorite due to its simplicity, low price, and lengthy list of existing invoice templates. Invoices can be customized to use your own company’s logo and marketing messages, or even completely outfitted with different CSS and layout data. Whether you need to send a monthly reminder or wish to completely automate credit card processing, this is the online app to use.

13. Isolator

Isolator is a simple application that lets you do one thing: focus on doing one thing. Users can block out needless distractions and configure Isolator to limit their Mac’s attention to the active window, cutting out needless fiddling and helping to get things done. While not particularly useful for design on its own, it’s one of the most lucrative free applications we’ve found for designers that just can’t focus without a little push.

The app itself is a small, unobtrusive square that sits in OSX’s menu bar. Click it and you’ll switch it on, limiting your focus to a single task and (hopefully) helping you get more done. If you’re a sucker for distractions, Isolator is a must-have addition to your Mac.

14. Things

Things is a task manager with a difference – one of the few time and project management apps that actually helps users get more individual tasks done, offering both traditional to-do lists and a more in-depth interface for managing personal and business tasks. It’s clean, collaboration-friendly, and freely able to synchronize with your iPhone or iPad.

If you work alongside a team of designers, developers, or artists, Things is a must-have addition to your digital workspace. Projects are organized similarly to files in Snow Leopard’s sidebar, giving frequent OSX users a quick and familiar interface for organizing tasks. Single-user licenses are just $49.95, while multi-user packages start from $74.95.

15. CSSEdit

There’s nothing less interesting than scrolling through style sheets in a text editor. CSSEdit is one of the best Mac development applications out there, offering designers and web developers a different choice for styling websites and modifying CMS themes. Use the X-Ray feature to tag and check on-page elements, or simply use CSSEdit’s clean and feature laden text workspace to edit page style.

Pair CSSEdit with TextMate and you’ll end up with the Mac’s most intuitive code and style sheet editing suite. A demo version is available with a few limitations (files are limited to 2500 characters and editing options are slightly restricted), and the application itself is available to purchase for $39.

Mac Users: Do you know any must-have design apps?

Our fifteen-part lineup covers the major bases for Mac users, but it’s far from a complete collection. If you know a certain must-have design, development, productivity, or collaboration application for Mac OSX, feel free to let us know in the comments section. No app is too small – desktop utilities, iPhone applications, and online tools are all welcome.

It’s tempting to think that we’re in the middle of a design revolution, although we’re not quite sure that’s the case. Industrial design has resulted in new inventions, sleek products, and ultra-popular devices for hundreds of years, and it’s certainly not a discipline that’s limited to the 21st century.

We’ve tracked down seven products that define industrial design as a discipline. Some are rugged and built to last, while others remain somewhat delicate and immobile. What brings them together isn’t their function, purpose, or technological ability, but the way they present it. Each one of these design innovations gave technology a user-friendly and attractive canvas on which to operate, and each caused a major design revolution in their respective industries.

1. Tivoli Model One

Henry Kloss has a long history in the consumer audio business. The engineer helped design some of the 20th century’s most important loudspeakers, pioneering bookshelf speakers and creating a string of slick, engineered, and distinctly minimalistic devices along the way. Before his death in 2002, the legendary designer engineered one final product: the Tivoli Model One radio.

The Model One is the home audio industry’s iPod – a piece of engineering so bare and minimalistic that it’s usable by almost anyone. While the most basic (and most popular) version includes just an AM/FM tuner and volume control, more advanced versions of the Model One are available, all of which offer a slightly different spin on the radio’s simplistic control layout.

2. Western Electric Model 302

Upon its release, Western Electric’s Model 302 telephone was a technological marvel. The telephone featured a built-in mechanical ringer and accurate turn-dial calling interface – two features that were considered innovations at the time. Released in 1937 and manufactured for over three decades, the Model 302 was the world’s first mass-market telephone and a huge success for AT&T.

Despite its ancient design and analog calling system, the Model 302 remains an attractive piece of technology. Amazingly, it’s also one that is just as supported today as it was upon its release; plug the Model 302 into a standard phone outlet and you’ll find it’s just as capable of making calls as any other telephone. The ultimate executive desk phone? We certainly think so.

3. IBM DiskOnKey

The early days of flash storage certainly weren’t cheap. IBM’s DiskOnKey was the first mass-market flash storage drive, and boy was it an expensive piece of kit. Priced at $49.00USD and offering an at-the-time impressive figure of eight whole megabytes of storage, it’s a wonder this pocket storage wonder sold at all.

But look at the DiskOnKey’s rivals and you’ll see that it’s actually a fairly decent deal. The storage device was released in 1999, designed to compete with the then-standard floppy disc and ZIP drive. While the DiskOnKey certainly isn’t as elegant or sharp as our other favorites, its form makes it an important milestone in the industrial design timeline.

4. Nintendo NES

In many ways, the Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES, for short) was the world’s first modern gaming console. While Atari and other manufacturers had broken ground with their Pong systems and Pacman arcade games, it wasn’t until Nintendo put out their first major console that gaming became mainstream.

And it’s not hard to see why. Despite its chunky eighties appearance, the NES remains one of the most enduring designs in technology. It quite literally revolutionized gaming design, bringing new features into the fold – the removable control pad, directional control buttons, and licensed gaming cartridge are all NES innovations – and proving that gaming systems needn’t look like the work of an amateur radio enthusiast to be successful.

5. iPhone

Apple’s endlessly praised (and equally hated) smartphone has grown into one of the 21st century’s most important pieces of technology, making touchscreens a standard smartphone feature and all-but eliminating the tactile keyboard. With multi-touch controls and one of the mobile world’s first good web browsers, the iPhone was the ultimate in disruptive technology after its 2007 release.

If there’s one certain way to check for ‘revolutionary’ status, it’s through imitation. The iPhone has been endlessly copied throughout its run, its features and design now incorporated into almost every competing touchscreen device. While business users despise its virtual keyboard and techies decry its semi-ridiculous App Store policies, there’s no doubt that the iPhone is one of the mobile world’s most important design milestones.

6. Citroën DS

The Citröen DS certainly didn’t fit in alongside other executive cars of the 1950s. The French high-end vehicle weighed little more than a ton, offered a laundry list of modern features, and actually looked, well, good. The passion project of famed Italian automotive designer Flaminio Bertoni, the DS was built with almost no regard for automotive standards or design principles.

But strangely enough, it worked. The DS is remembered as one of the 20th century’s best vehicles, claiming credit for inventions such as directional headlights (now a standard safety feature) and adjustable suspension. The car’s design was so timeless that it remained virtually unchanged during its twenty-year production run, with Citröen selling almost 1.5 million DSes in total.

7. Rolex Oyster Perpetual

How did the world’s most conservative watch company pioneer so many new features? While Rolex watches are best known as a creature comfort of the super rich, the Swiss luxury brand certainly has a few disruptive technologies up their sleeve. The Oyster Perpetual was the first line of watches to feature a built-in calendar system – a major innovation in the late 1940s.

But far from their technical advances, the Oyster Perpetual line remains an example of supreme form. While other watch manufacturers focused on adding superfluous features, Rolex built the Oyster line around simplicity and design. Clean, evenly spaced, and relatively minimal alongside other Swiss brands, there’s a reason these watches can command high five-figure prices.

Consistency

One of the most important techniques is consistency. If you use the default styling of a website you will notice how consistent the styling remains. Links have the colour blue and are underlined, lists look like lists with bullet points or numbers. I understand that styling can vary slightly between browsers but the consistency is present.

By being consistent you are reducing confusion and improving the user’s experience. If a person visits your website and can’t find a single underlined blue word he/she immediately has to determine how the links are styled on the website. If the user accomplishes this and finds out that links are highlighted brown then the user will then know what links are available and what to click on. If however some links are styled differently on the page there is a high chance that the user may miss or ignore them. For this reason it is essential that the number of different stylings you have for any element is kept to a low value, I would recommend about three. Of course to be fully consistent only one styling should be given to each element with perhaps some differentiating values for padding and margin to position elements.

One website I particular enjoy that maintains link consistency is CSS Wizardry by Harry Roberts:

He actually uses four link stylings on the page but the majority of links have one particular styling. Links that he has styled differently are renowned to be links no matter how they’re designed. These include navigation and the logo/name of the website.

I mentioned padding and margin values above and stated that they can vary for positioning purposes. Although this is true, again the less number of different values you use for margin and padding you will find the better your design will look. CSS Wizardry (without looking at the source) looks very consistent. The same line-height is maintained throughout the design, as well as indentations. There are also very few variations in font-sizes.

Subtlety

Another technique that involves websites with more rich designs that use a number of images, is subtlety. Many designers choose to question whether an element or image is required on a webpage, if it is not they discard it. Web designers that tend to do this are more likely to find minimalism is their acquired skill. However, although some elements may be removed, there are some that when made more subtle their effect magnifies.

Liam McKay of WeFunction is somewhat of an expert with this technique, just view his work on Dribbble and you will understand the true meaning of subtlety.

Even Google emphasises the importance of subtlety after their logo redesign. The previous logo with its bold and outdated bevelled surface and dark shadow is reduced to a logo with a hint of bevelled surface and a drop shadow.

White space

A final technique is the use of white space. There have been many articles regarding this topic and so you should be familiar with this term. However, for the few who aren’t, white space is in a way, emptiness. It is areas of design that contain no elements. For example, if you were to give an element a padding value of 20 pixels then that space would be white space (unless of course there is something absolutely/relatively position there).

Now when it comes to white space I believe the more the better, it is for this reason that I can’t understand why some designers would want to cram two elements close together. A website should never be cluttered and if it is, then it needs a rethink and a redesign/realign. Like many techniques white space continually gets used more and more every day.

Two websites that I believe use white space effectively are:

Kaleidoscope

WPBundle

For each section on both websites almost a whole screen resolution is given. This puts traditional website designs to shame with 2,3 even 4 columned layouts. Every section clear and there is no confusion to what section you are reading.

In summary

By following the above techniques I am certain that your website designs will improve. As long as attempt any of these techniques you should see an improvement in your work. Of course there a number of other techniques that can and should be used but I feel the ones mentioned are the most important. Well there you have it, I hope you enjoyed this article and I look forward to your new website designs.