Design Practice

Is your website like a leaky bucket?

A lot of companies make money by driving traffic to their sites through marketing or SEO campaigns in the hope that some of their visitors will turn into customers. This makes sense when attention is plentiful and online marketing is cheap. However as marketing costs rise and attention becomes increasingly scarce, companies need to look outside of the traditional marketing funnel. Rather than simply increasing traffic, companies need to start focussing on conversions. After all there's no point spending large sums of money pushing people to your site if they leave when they get there.

Tech Culture

Don't treat your website like a commodity

The traditional approach to product development involves coming up with new idea and then driving as many people towards that product as possible, in the hope that some of them will want it. As such we adopt the language of marketing, and talk about marketing funnels and conversion rates. If our marketing department has done a good job they will have created a campaign that not only generates traffic, but creates a previously unrecognised need. Tired? Need a break? Why not have a KitKat?

Design Practice

Usability as a Marketing Tool

Despite being 2009, one of the biggest complaints I hear from people when describing their online activities is how difficult websites are to use. People get amazingly frustrated when they're trying to do something seemingly simple and the website continuously gets in the way. It's almost as though the people designing or commissioning the website haven't used it themselves. For most consumers this idea seems incredible, but sadly it's largely still the case.

Design Practice

Silverback, One Month On

"Silverback":http://silverbackapp.com/ launched just over a month ago and what a roller coaster month that was. We launched towards the end of July and within the first couple of days the app had been downloaded 7,000 times. Thirty days on and well over 20,000 people have grabbed themselves a copy. Crikey! For the first couple of weeks the whole company was hooked on the Twitter feedback. I had a Summize window permanently open and kept refreshing the search every few minutes. Messages were coming thick and fast and I was pretty bowled over by the feedback. The messages were so unbelievably positive I actually started to worry. After all it was just a little usability testing app and wasn't going to cure hunger and bring about world peace. Here is just a small selection of the comments we received...

Design Practice

Silverback Exposed

Since my last post people have been clamouring for more details on "Silverback":http://silverbackapp.com/, so I thought I’d explain where the idea came from, then show you a few screenshots.

Design Practice

Silverback Unveiled

A few months ago Clearleft accidentally leaked the fact we were working on our own application, known as Silverback. I say accidentally because we had just bought the domain name silverbackapp.com and thought we’d better post up a holding page. However the combination of a great logo from Jon Hicks and an amazingly inventive parallax technique from Paul meant the page got far more coverage than anticipated. Before the week was out we had over 5,000 people registered for updates and had started to receive comments like “I don’t know what Silverback is, but I know that I want it!? So no pressure there then!