If you know Brandan and me, you probably know our sense of humor. When we redesigned Lime Tiger’s “About” page, we really wanted to reflect that humor and the creative edge we try to bring to our work.
We started casting ourselves in iconic duos of popular culture by tackling “Twilight.” For those of you without tween/teen girls in your lives, “Twilight” has taken popular culture by storm, rewriting the vampire canon from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice by adding questionable bits (sparkling skin, anyone?) and generally romanticizing the crap out of vampirism. Seriously, would you want a 108-year-old undead guy stalking your high-school-age daughter?
An after-work photo shoot meant our friends Kristen and Jim could help behind the camera, so at 7:00 one evening we brought together the four of us, a $3.99 bottle of Rite-Aid’s palest foundation, a camera, and a bottle of wine. (It was going to take some relaxing to get Brandan into the requisite three pounds of makeup and hair product.)
After a good bit of trial and error and wine, we realized the “Twilight” movie poster was probably a composite of two separate shots of RPattz and KStew. Too bad. We were determined to recreate the whole thing with a couple of Home Depot clamp lights and a black sheet. Our first pose went well, don’t you think? Let’s hear it for Brandan’s homemade “Team Jacob” t-shirt!
Ever helpful throughout the four-hour shoot, Kristen (our hair and makeup angel) and Jim (grip, camera guy, and cat wrangler) stepped in to demonstrate the spirit of the pose that Brandan was failing to capture. (Perhaps it was the copious amounts of hair spray, or maybe those bobby pins were too tight.)
A weekend of Photoshopping later — seriously, retouching photos is tedious work — our first “About Us” popular culture pairing was complete. I think we nailed it. See for yourself how they compare side-by-side.
Stay tuned for January’s reenactment — a new duo will be unveiled!
Brandan got you going with part 1 of this tutorial — the technical foundation for your site.
If you didn’t go through our short list of discovery questions earlier, now is a great time. With your answers in hand, we can tackle the creative process.
Gather content
Start with what you do know
Chances are you’ve already got something that talks about your business — a print ad, a business plan, etc. Get together materials like that, plus any photos, videos, and your company logo. Need a logo? We do that too — just ask.
Imagine your website is a brochure
Like a good brochure, your site does two important things:
Talks to a targeted audience — who is your audience?
Communicates useful, actionable facts — what do you want to say?
But, unlike a brochure, a website is all about user experience. So the most important question to answer is what do your visitors want/expect?
Find examples
Let’s be clear — it is not okay to cut and paste someone else’s work. But it can be extremely helpful to look around other websites and see:
What you like
What your competitors are doing
What your industry is doing
What your customers might expect to find on your site
Show us websites that have information and/or features that you like. We’ll never plagiarize, but we will take your input into consideration.
With all of your content in hand — and not before — we can concentrate on the structure of your site. Just as if we were building a home, we want to make sure you have a sturdy structure that:
Supports your content
Is arranged sensibly
Can be added to
Your wireframe is basically a flow chart showing how each part of your website is connected. It will probably take several iterations of a wireframe in order to get the structure’s flow just right.
The page bone’s connected to the navigation bone
Everyone expects an arm to connect to a wrist, and a wrist to a hand, and so on. It’s the same with your site structure. Even before they’ve seen your site, visitors expect certain things to be in certain places. We can help you know what a typical user expects, like clicking your logo to get to the home page.
(Yeah, I used to be a loner and a rebel too, Dottie…
But unless your business is ABOUT breaking the rules, the Internet is not the place to try it. A confused visitor will just leave.)
Occasionally, we need to revise our estimate at this point. Five pages of content can easily become six or seven in order to make sense and be easy to use. If this situation comes up, we’ll discuss your options.
Don’t look back
Now you’re ready to get a visual look. Small things may still need to change throughout the rest of the process, but at this point all of the content is present and accounted for in the wireframe. If you add new content or change the flow of information after this point, you’re changing the scope of the project — and that means more work, time, and money.
Design page layouts
From here, we’ll use your existing visual identity to create pages that organize and present your content while maintaining your “look.” Usually, we mock up an illustration of your home page, often with placeholder copy (lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, etc.), to give you an idea of how text, photos, and graphics look on the page.
After a round or two of tweaking the home page mock-up, we’ll get your green light to start building all the pages. If there are very complex or technical pages, we’ll ask you to approve those mocked-up layouts as well before actually building them.
Yep, after all this, there still isn’t a website. Brandan and I will now work together to build a test site where you can see everything in action. Once all the pages are online, approved by you, and tested in multiple web browsers, we’ll unveil your site to the world.
More about this final part of the journey in part 3!
But words can drive your website visitors away, to paraphrase The Bee Gees.
Most visitors will only read a small number of words on a computer screen, compared to the number of words they might read in a magazine or newspaper.
You are qualified
The good news is that you are highly qualified to write about your business — you know it better than anyone else. Your website visitors don’t want to read fluffy market-speak. Just think about the most straightforward words and phrases that you would use to describe your business to a person you met in the street.
Five easy questions
The old standard “who, what, where, when, why” questions are a great place to start:
who are you/who is your business?
what can you do for someone?
if location is a factor in your business, where are you?
when was your company started, or how much experience do you have?
why is your product/service great/unique/desirable?
Three top tips
Nothing fancy is required. Plain speaking, short sentences, and bullet points are your best writing tools. In other words, use:
plain speaking,
short sentences, and
bullet points.
Scanning, not reading
Keep things short and sweet. The average website user scans a page rather than reading it word-by-word. Recent user studies emphasize how little actual reading takes place on a web page, so avoid large, unbroken blocks of text.
Stories — know when to hold ’em
A final, important consideration is the needs of your users. What do they want to find out, and how?
Some users want information as quickly as possible. As nice as it is to hear the heartwarming story of how you inherited an old family shovel, which led you to a lifelong passion for gardening, so you opened your own landscaping business after years in college, consider that some users are just looking for the facts about what you can do for them:
is your business capable?
how much experience do you have?
are your prices competitive?
Other users will value the story of you and your business — and, more abstractly, the story of your relationship with the user now and in the future. Part of what branding does is provide a foundation for the relationship with your clients. Developing your content is definitely part of your branding, and should be consistent with how you present yourself in all areas.
Like The Bee Gees said, it is only words. There’s nothing to fear except writing too much, or failing to provide useful information. Short, simple website content using plain words and bulleted lists will tell your users what they want to know. And that will make your website work for you and for them.
Sometimes I shudder to think what my mechanic must drive around in. If his job is at all like ours, there’s never any time to work on his own car because wonderful clients are bringing in so many wonderful other cars for him to work on. Hence, his ’88 Olds Cutlass must be in sore need of some TLC.
Lime Tiger needed some TLC, too. After almost two years with only minor content updates, we realized things had to change. Gone are the lovely-to-look-at, painful-to-maintain complex background colors and patterns. [Curses, IE6! /shakes fist]
Things are clean and white, the portfolio has room to breathe thanks to Brandan’s deft hand at JavaScript magic, and we now sport a blog. Who knows, we may even have a Facebook page up by 2020.
The important thing is that we’ve been busy helping out a fantastic set of clients this past year. I hope you’ll poke around the new site and stay tuned to see some of our new work — maybe even sign up for our RSS feed. Exciting things are going to be afoot (and a-paw) in 2010 as we mark the return of the Year of the Tiger. Look out for party hats all around, and specials you’ll only find here on our website.
