Below is a weekly roundup of design articles I pulled this week that I thought were A) very interesting or B) useful in our PPC world. Comment below with your thoughts on the articles or what you would like to see in next weeks Design Dish.
6 Ways To Redesign Your Forms And Get More Leads
“The seemingly simple process for collecting information can have an huge impact on the number of inbound leads you can generate”
- Don’t request more information than is actually necessary
- Do use a balance of clean, airy form design with condensed information
- Do place the form above the fold and surrounded by supporting content that will encourage the user to proceed
- Do use trust badges that speak to data security or product guarantees to speak to the potential concerns of your customers
- Do use effective form messaging: “It needs to establish why someone should complete the form, how to complete it, and what happens next”
- Do use an active call to action that focuses on a positive outcome of the form submission. Also use a contrasting color on the button to make it pop and draw the users eye to the desired action.
7 Cheat Sheets Every Content Creator and Editor Should Bookmark
As a content creator for my company, and for my own personal hobbies, I am always looking for things that will make my life easier and my tasks more manageable. Anything that I come across that could potentially optimize my process is immediately getting bookmarked and referenced daily. This article, put out by kapost, has turned me on to a few new tools for my design arsenal. Included in the article is a social media image guide, an HTML cheat sheet, the best times to post on social media, and a proofreading checklist.
Where Should You Start Testing?
A very insightful article helping the reader work through where they should run their first tests, and the answer is: where it hurts the most, and where you can learn the fastest. Once you’ve figured out where you should run your tests, you have to decide what to test on those pages. The biggest take away: “Ignore generic advice. Your job is to figure out what specific problems the pages in questions have.” There is no one size fits all solution when it comes to testing. Get some insight into the doubts and hesitations that YOUR audience has on YOUR page, and then come up with a test hypothesis to address those issues.
Featured Website Design: ibrewmyowncoffee.com
I stumbled across this website through a design spotlight on Panda (a daily news and inspiration app). What stuck out to me, other than being an entire site about brewing coffee, was how minimal it was in its design. It only uses three colors, white, black and blue to break up the sections. Yet, it doesn’t come across as boring. The typeface selected complements the architecture of the design and the information is displayed in an easily digestible way. The color changing navigation bar, and strike-through text, gives just enough animation to keep your attention during the scrolling and navigation through the site. Everything is laid out in a clean, simple way that makes sense. I think its refreshing to see a website that seems so minimal, yet it works. I think it’s easy to get caught up in adding different elements to a page to “spice things up,” but ibrewmyowncoffee.com proves that when you strip all of that extra fluff away you can be left with something that works a hell of a lot better.
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