Improve your site for next year with WallCann’s 7 Key Factors to Online Success. http://bit.ly/1iNZf2

RT @Prakky: Good wrap-up of #nocleanfeed action around the country. http://ow.ly/OozC #socadl

Reviewing very useful tips on building the Perfect Home Page for our prosumer advocates. http://bit.ly/6wWNqy

A home page needs to answer two questions to a visitor, at a glance:
1. Where am I?
2. What can I do here?
The first is essential, and often fudged a bit too much. New Visitors want to know if they clicked on what they thought they did, and if they came to the kind of place they were looking for. So the Home Page needs to be a friendly signpost and a welcome mat. IN short a tightly built Pre sale page.
The second point is the invitation to explore. The issue of information architecture is essential — you want your copy and navigation labels to tell the site’s story, but to tell it very efficiently.
A home page is not the spot to get expansive - it’s a place to say “This website will be easy for you to deal with”
Even though the page needs to be your welcome mat, it’s also not the place to explicitly say “welcome to widget world” or “we are the number one provider of widgets and gadgets in this area”.
No one cares — get down to business for your users, and you will retain a greater share of traffic and see fewer “one hit wonders” in your server logs. The welcome can be implied by your thoughtfulness, and the blowing of your own horn can be tucked away in the “about” section on a small utility menu, in most cases.
A new visitor gets a quick orientation the minute they arrive and then that job is done. On their second click they can be focused on the content, the information, rather than learning the mechanics of the interface — you already gave them that on the home page.

Summarizing the above points are Basic guidelines that we here at WallCann would like to give to our Prosumer Advocates
A) Tell the new visitor at a glance whether or not he’s likely found what he’s looking for and
B) Route the return visitor as quickly and easily as possible to the page devoted completely to the task he came there to perform.
C) An informational website is something else, but when the website that sells something to actual customers, then there’s no substitute for task-driven design.
D) Write down all the tasks people come there to perform. Prioritize them. Then do walkthroughs of each task. You’ll find mistakes like: the most important task has been given the least amount of screen real estate on the home page, there’s no visible way to accomplish a given task from the home page, etc.
E) Worry about the colors and pretty images later (much later), after you can show that the website makes it easy to actually accomplish what the visitors came there to do.

RT @webofdesign: Where do you find big companies vector logos for free? #webdesign http://bit.ly/8D8LS6