These six basic but oh-so-often violated simple rules should guide the design for any website. Despite the simplicity of these, we’ve seen every single one of these rules being broken over the years — from different sets of navigation on each page of a website to a home page containing a book’s worth of content…. More »
The Journey Is the Destination: A Case Study of a “Typical” Design Process
The design process is capricious. One of our latest projects is a classic example of this. Here’s how it’s gone so far: We promise the client two designs for the project. Round 1: We bring three designs to the client (after about seven went through internal review and four failed …). Client can’t decide between… More »
4 Tips for Picking the Right Color for Your Brand
I’m back from a brief commercial break while I recovered from ACL (knee) surgery to talk about color theory and how it applies to your brand. This question came up during our webinar last month on strategic branding. One of the attendees was in the process of developing her brand for the first time and… More »
Know Your Users: Simple Features Make the Difference
In web design, as in life, sometimes the smallest gesture can make the biggest impact. I was recently asked by a Board member of the nonprofit, Center for Domestic Peace to help them with their brand strategy. So first thing I did was look up their website (like 90% of people). What struck me the… More »
Is Your Website Sticky or Slippery?
One of the nice things about having been working in the web world since the mid-90s (I came out of the science world so we were “playing” with the web before it became a big popular thing), I’ve seen a lot of trends and changes. Always interesting to see how things change. Five or so… More »
Introducing Ready, Set, Launch!: Our New Quick Start Launch Program
Do you need to get your new venture launched very quickly and with a fixed cost? Do you need a soup to nuts identity (logo, stationery designs and a slick website)? Not sure it can be done in your crazy short timeframe? Then consider our fixed-scope, fixed-fee quick start launch program, Ready, Set, Launch! We… More »
Drinking Our Own Medicine Is Painful
For the last several months, I’ve been running ThinkResults Marketing through our own full relaunch process and it’s been a humbling experience. When we’re working with clients through a launch process, we are fully prepared for emotional reactions, for them to take longer to move through the plan than they expect, and for there to… More »
Google!
Sheesh, after over a dozen years of trying to decipher Google’s highly secret rubric for search, I think we’ve gotten darn good at it. We’ve catapulted brands to the top of the search heap and seen them maintain that position sometimes for YEARS after we finished our search engine optimization work for them. So we… More »
Do Politics and Hosting Providers Mix?
Hosting provider discussion = heated and passionate … really? Who knew? Just recently, our team entered into a vehement discussion of the pros and cons of various hosting providers. I had no idea our tech experts felt so passionate about such a seemingly simple decision. The discussion was spurred by a recent ZDNet posting spied… More »
What the heck is a “favicon” and why do I care?
Ah, back to the ol’ days, when all we had to do was design a logo that reflected our brand well, and could fit on the side of a pen, as well as a billboard. Living was easy then …. Now we need to be sure the logo, or an element of it, can be… More »