Le Cafe Noir Studio

Le Cafe Noir Studio is a Dutch brand founded by the stylist Lizzy van der Ligt.
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

16 Video Marketing Stats You Need to Know (infographic)

With video streaming websites like YouTube skyrocketing in popularity, an increasing number of businesses have taken advantage of this booming marketing opportunity. Videos might be more expensive to produce than tweets and graphics, but they also offer much more flexibility that you can't get...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website http://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

5 UX Design Trends from Smashing Conference San Francisco

San Francisco is design. Seemingly everything about the city—from the simple elegance of Coit Tower looking down on the city to the distant beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge—is a masterclass in beauty and form.

It’s no surprise then that Smashing Magazine chose one of the city’s most beautiful and noted locales, the Palace of Fine Arts, to hold one of its conferences this year. 

Smashing Conference San Francisco 2017 was full of amazing speakers and concepts that could benefit all UX designers. Here are five of the key trends from the conference.

Attendees to the Smashing Conference 2017 in San Francisco celebrate the beginning of the conference with balloons.

Accessibility is key

It’s easy to think about web accessibility in terms of the blind, deaf, or quadriplegic, and to write them off as representing a small minority of web users. After all, the industry as a whole has done so for years, arguing that designing to their needs was not a reasonable use of valuable development time.

But what about those who are recovering from eye surgery? Or the construction workers who can’t hear audio over the noise of the job site? What about the new mother using an app with one hand and holding a baby in the other?

The reality is that virtually all web users have experienced some sort of accessibility issue, regardless of whether or not their impairment was temporary or permanent.

The conference covered a wide range of topics, and accessibility was a topic of discussion for all. It’s clear that many of the industry’s top professionals have a renewed focus on developing sites, apps, and experiences that meet the needs and capabilities of all individuals, regardless of their limitations.  

For many UX professionals, learning to design with an eye for accessibility will be a new skill that can no longer be ignored.

Design systems and pattern libraries are getting easier and more common

Even in the world of user experience, not everyone has had the chance to work on a true design system or pattern library. The reason? They require a significant amount of effort, maintenance and documentation to setup. As many UX designers have experienced, it’s often hard to quantify the value of a design project based on the project’s expected return on investment. The nature of setting up a design system only makes the task of quantifying its value more difficult.   

But where there is differentiation based on using design systems, there’s often a big gap between the haves and the have-nots. Larger companies such as Google and AirBnB (to name a few of the front-runners) now use them as a matter of course, and see them as a strategic advantage over competitors.  

The rest of the web is catching on. Tools like Fractal and Astrum have sprouted up to allow even the smallest projects to adopt and efficiently use a pattern library or design system. UX professionals will be tasked with deciding both if a design system would be useful for a particular project, and then implementing that system if the benefits are there.

CSS Grid will make executing layouts easier

I’m convinced that some of the more experienced web designers still wake up some nights in a cold sweat, desperately gasping for breath as the old demons of their first table-based or float-based layouts mock them from dreamland.

Fortunately, Flexbox changed the game when it came to designing a more grid-based layout, and now CSS Grid looks to change things once again. CSS Grid allows designers to create layouts in rows in columns without having a content structure, which means that designs that once brought tears to developers’ eyes won’t be nearly as difficult to implement.  

CSS Grid has gained support from all modern browsers except for Microsoft Edge, though Edge has announced that they will be supporting it soon. With widespread support, look for CSS Grid-based designs to quickly become the norm.

Part of being a great UX designer is understanding the relative difficulty of implementing our designs. CSS Grid means a greater ease in implementation for developers, greater freedom for designers, and less time the two groups spend negotiating layouts.

That’s a win for everyone.

Optimistic Design is on the rise

In everyday life, we expect most of the tools we use to interact with our world will be successful the vast majority of the time. When we flip a light switch, we expect it will turn on. When we turn the knob to the sink, we expect water will start running. We only need to know about the very rare failures when they occur; we don’t need to expect the possibility of failure every time.

So why should the web be any different?

Optimistic Design is the concept that we can plan for our site to be successful in its “everyday” tasks. Errors are handled on the server rather than on the page, allowing us to move the user through the UI faster. Errors only return if they present themselves. The perceived upgrade in speed and responsiveness is a huge win for both users looking for speedy services and businesses looking to increase conversions.

Learning to implement Optimistic Design and defining best practices is a discipline that more designers will begin to tinker with over the course of the coming year.

In between presenters, a large screen on-stage at Smashing Conference San Francisco 2017 highlights Doug Collins’ notes on the presentations. Doug updated his notes in real-time on the UX Mastery Forums.

There’s no excuse to stop learning

The one thing that Smashing 2017 San Francisco was absolutely full of was amazing speakers who had dedicated their lives to mastering a craft. Speakers focused on data visualisations, interactive emails, typography design, and so much more, all with the aim of making the web a better place for everyone.

All of these brilliant designers and developers clearly have one thing in common: they never stop learning.

The web is full of opportunities to make a name for ourselves in our own niche. The very nature of the internet is progressive and fluid. We’re all learning as we go, and nobody ever knows everything.  

Keep learning, keep improving, and keep making the web a better place.

For more insights from Smashing Conference, head to the forums to see Doug’s live coverage.

The post 5 UX Design Trends from Smashing Conference San Francisco appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Doug Collins via UX Mastery

The Secret to Conversion Rate Optimization

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

We talk a lot about optimization in digital marketing. There’s different ways to optimize your website and pages to appeal to search engines, social media traffic, PPC channels, content marketing and more. Each of these optimizations generally focus on how you optimize your site to get more people to start the conversion process - filling the top of the funnel.

But what do you do when almost no one makes it to the end of the funnel?

What you need here is conversion rate optimization (CRO).

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Before we get into the magic behind optimizing your conversion funnels, let’s first go over what conversion rate optimization is and the key terms and ideas behind it.

Formally, conversion rate optimization is the structured and systematic use of analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website. Basically, it’s finding out where and why users don’t convert, and fixing it.

An important part of CRO is maximizing the value of your current traffic, not increasing traffic to your website. This is important. If you’ve got a leaky pipeline, you need to fix the leaks before you increase the volume.

Now, a quick marketing vocabulary lesson. There’s a good chance you already know some or most of these terms, but it’s important for everyone to know all of them.

• Conversion: The action you want taken on your website. This is often used to mean an order, but could also mean email sign up, account registration, ebook download, or any other action that transforms a website browser into a customer or hot lead.
• Conversion rate: A pretty simple idea, it’s the percentage of website visitors that convert on your website, or the number of users, per 100 visitors, who finish the conversion process. It’s calculated as (Number of conversions/Total number of website visitors) * 100.
• Call-to-Action (CTA): An instruction to the audience to take an immediate action. These are typically buttons or links with the words "buy", “sign up,” “order” or whatever your website’s conversion is. They also usually use the word “now” to create a sense of immediate urgency.
• Conversion/Sales Funnel: The primary path visitors use to complete a conversion. An ecommerce site, for example, could have a funnel of home page, category page, product page, checkout. This funnel will vary widely between websites and market segments.
• Exit rate: The percentage of people who leave your site after viewing a page. Note that this isn’t the same thing as bounce rate, as it includes people who arrive on the page from elsewhere on your site.
• Abandonment rate: The percentage of people who enter a conversion funnel, but leave before completing the process. For ecommerce sites this is also known as "shopping cart abandonment rate."

Set a Conversion Rate Baseline

CRO is about figuring out how to get to where you want to be, in terms of conversion rate. So it stands to reason that the first step is to measure where you are now. Otherwise, how do you measure progress? If you’ve already set up goals and funnels in analytics, you can skip ahead to the next section.

There are some basic steps you need to take in order to establish your current performance and measure performance when you start optimizing.

• Goals: Hopefully, you’ve already set up goals in your analytics tracking. If you haven’t yet done so, open up Google Analytics; select your account, property and view (if you have more than one); and click Admin in the bottom left corner. Click on Goals and then "+Goal" to create a new one. Select “Goal Type” — the type of goal you will track (more on this in a minute). When naming your goal, be descriptive. Don’t count on yourself to remember the difference between “Goal 1” and “Goal 2” six months down the line.
• Funnel: If you have a multi-step conversion process, such as creating an account or completing a checkout process, check the box for "Use funnel." Enter the URLs of your goal funnel, matching the rules you set for your goal URL (if your goal URL is an exact match or RegEx, your funnel URLs will be, too). Check the box for “Required Steps” if you only want to track users who start at step one of the funnel. Otherwise, Analytics will count people who enter the funnel in the middle or end. Note that setting the funnel will affect the way the funnel visualization report works, but people who land on the goal URL through other ways will still get counted in conversion reporting.
• Value: How you measure conversions will impact what you put here (it’s optional, but using a value here will make optimizations so much easier in the future). If you know an exact amount a trial signup is worth to you, great. Otherwise, put an approximate or average amount here. This will let you track how much your CRO efforts are impacting your revenue stream.

Let’s go over the types of goals here really quickly. This is an important step, because it’s the part that lets you track all sorts of different conversions on your site.

• URL Destination: This type of goal measures the number of times people visit the specified page. These goals are good for tracking confirmation pages, thank you pages and PDFs stored on your site.
• Visit Duration: This goal measures how long people spend on your site, and records a goal for any duration that meets the duration goal. This type of goal is good for FAQ-type sites that want to answer users’ questions as quickly as possible (so a goal that is achieved for a visit less than a duration), as well as measuring engagement (setting a goal that is achieved for a visit more than a certain duration). These goals can be tricky, however, as they work by comparing timestamps for pageviews. If someone doesn’t click to another page, there’s no way to measure duration. This goal can still be useful when comparing change over time.
• Page/Visit: This type of goal measures the number of pages viewed during a visit. Like duration, this is good for customer support sites (the fewer pages visited the better) and engagement (the more, the merrier).
• Event: Event goals are a bit more complicated than the other three, because they require adding code to your website. This goal type is great for measuring clicks on external links (such as affiliate links), download buttons, video viewership, social sharing buttons and widget usage. The only problem with event tracking is that you can’t build a funnel around it. Funnels require each step to have a unique URL, which events don’t have.

Ok, so you’ve decided what conversions you want to measure, established how you’ll measure them and set up your funnels. Now it’s time to work some CRO magic.

Conversion Rate Optimization Magic

When optimizing your website’s conversion rate, there are two approaches to take: the landing page and the conversion funnel. It’s important to differentiate between these two parts because the objectives and pain points for each will be different.

Landing Page Optimization

If your website is suffering serious conversion underperformance, the landing page should be your first suspect. Your site’s landing pages’ job is to get people into the funnel, so this is a natural place to start with your optimizations.

When creating landing pages, build them to be testable. You should be able to easily swap out (or delete entirely) different elements to test what works and what doesn’t. Each landing page should have the following pieces you can optimize:

Continue reading %The Secret to Conversion Rate Optimization%

by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint

How to Improve Site Performance (and Conversions) with Dareboost

Website performance is serious business. How many times have you become outrageously frustrated with a slow-loading website? If you're anything like me, you've probably closed a great number of tabs — and never returned to the offending website.

Having a slow website will turn visitors away, which means reduced pageviews, conversions, interactions, sales, and advertising revenues. Additionally, if you're running an online business, it will also result in shopping cart abandonment.

According to WPO Stats, The Trainline team found that reducing their product’s latency by 0.3 seconds across the conversion funnel led to customers spending an extra $11.5 million per year.

Fortunately, it's really easy to monitor and manage website performance, and that's where Dareboost comes in.

Dareboost is a platform that will keep track of website performance and quality, and it's really easy to use — you don't need to install anything. Sign up for an account, plug in your website details, and let it work its magic.

Dareboost is a freemium product. While you can get rich, useable data from a free account, the more advanced tooling is available for paid accounts.

Dareboost's tools provide you with great data, with standalone analyses providing actionable data immediately. Additionally, Dareboost’s monitoring tools accumulate data about your site’s performance over time, offering deeper insights.

Dareboost also has great alert functionality, allowing you to set up custom alerts for the metrics that are important to you.

Who Is Dareboost For?

Whether you run your own blog or you’re involved in your company’s online presence, Dareboost is for you if you have a vested interest in website performance. Every web professional can benefit from this tool.

With Dareboost's website performance and quality management, you are able to test, analyze, benchmark, and optimize your website.

Website Performance and Quality Analysis

Let's jump straight in and check out some of these great features, starting with the Website Speed Test. Please note we're using a premium account, which provides more options that we'll explore below.

First, you need to choose a page to test. You can also select if you want to test against a desktop using Chrome, or a mobile device, choosing one of five Android options or an iPhone 6, and a location.

Then there are some advanced settings. You can provide htaccess authentication credentials, decide whether you want to block ads or other scripts for the test, keep the report private to just yourself, and whether you'd like to disable HTTP/2.

Further, you can:

• Set the bandwidth available to the test — 3G, cable, fiber, or custom values.
• Set various screen resolutions to test.
• Mimic a POST request, to simulate what a user would see after form submission.
• Set HTTP headers, such as user agent.
• Allow and deny queries from certain domains.
• Map a hostname to another one, or by IP, and...
• Deny all kinds of animations.

All in all, you're getting real browser testing, which you can setup to emulate almost any kind of potential visitor.

Once you've made your choices, it's just a matter of executing the test. Regardless of your account type, you'll get the same amazingly detailed report, starting off with an overview of website quality and performance.

Straight away, we get an idea of how my chosen website performs, including 8 errors and 11 improvements highlighted. We're also told how many requests are made, and the data transfer required to build the page. The report also tells us the TTFB (time to first byte, a measure of server response speed), how long the page takes to start rendering, and how long until the page is completely loaded.

It also notes the various technologies detected on the website. For this site, we can see Google Analytics, Gravatar, Bootstrap, Twemoji, WordPress, Yoast SEO, jQuery, and PHP.

But perhaps one of my favorite features is being able to watch a video of how the page appears throughout the loading and rendering process, shown below in gif format for your viewing pleasure.

You can use the filmstrip to view the process frame by frame, and there are a range of metrics computed via video analysis. These include Start Render, Speed Index and Visually Complete, and are very useful metrics for improving your user experience (UX).

To figure out what to work on first, you can click on the "See your priorities" button (pictured above in the report screenshot), or refine the view depending on what category of issue you want to start with. You'll probably want to start with anything with a red marker, as they are arguably where you can make the easiest gains.

An area of improvement for the site I tested was image size, and because Dareboost knows the site runs on WordPress, it will tell me exactly which images need to be optimized and provides a few suggestions on plugins that will get the job done.

Dareboost will judge your page against over 100 criteria in at least 9 categories. That's far too many to dive into here, and given the Website Speed Test is completely free, I recommend you jump in and try it out.

Website Performance Monitoring

Next up we have Website Performance Monitoring, which allows you to monitor pages on your site over time.

Adding a page to Monitoring is very easy. In fact, it largely uses the same interface from the Performance and Quality testing tools, with a few additions. The immediate difference here is setting a name — otherwise the settings, including Advanced, are identical.

Past this you can set the schedule, where you choose from daily or hourly monitoring (a 15 minute frequency is also available on demand). If you're choosing daily, you can set the time of day that it executes — if you choose hourly, it'll simply run once per hour.

Finally, you can modify your digest settings. By default you will receive a weekly email digest, and naturally the only option here is for disabling it.

Once you have this configured, just click save and Dareboost will take care of the rest.

At first you'll see an overview as shown below, which will have no data as the monitoring has not yet begun. However, you can now configure alerts.

Setting up an alert is straightforward. You just need to choose which metric you want to be alerted about, and the threshold for triggering an alert when the metric is above or below a certain number. This feature will help you immediately detect slowdowns and quality regressions, or know when a page is becoming too heavy.

I've set up an alert that will notify me if my page is triggering HTTP errors (broken images, third-party provider errors, etc.), since they need to be fixed quickly if they happen.

Once you have some pages set up to be monitored, all you need to do is wait for the data to be populated over time, and keep an eye out for any email alerts that may come your way.

Within Dareboost you are provided with a Monitoring Dashboard, which gives you a brief look at each of the pages you have monitored, showing only the need-to-know details.

Now to show you where Monitoring really shines: viewing and analyzing the data. Click on whatever page you want to learn more about, and you're presented with plenty of information.

The first data you will see covers the changes in important stats from the last seven days, including TTFB, time to start rendering, time until fully loaded, speed index, and how many of Dareboost’s 100 criteria you’ve been successful in, with the graph broken down into four parts:

1. Performance metrics
2. Page score
3. Page weight
4. Number of requests

Rather than go through all of them, I'll show you an example of the number of requests graph. I've focused on March 13th, where you can see 48 total requests for the page in question, predominantly images, followed by JavaScript, and then the rest.

Continue reading %How to Improve Site Performance (and Conversions) with Dareboost%

by Aaron Osteraas via SitePoint

4 Lead Nurturing Strategies for Better Conversion Rate Optimization

When it comes to digital marketing, few things receive as much attention as traffic generation does. In fact every time Google takes so much as a hiccup, it sends the entire online marketing community into a tizzy!

While traffic is no doubt the lifeblood of the internet, it stands to reason that what you do once you have it is just as important, if not more so. Lately, conversion rate optimization (CRO) has been garnering a lot of attention, and for good reason — any webmaster will want to convert as much of their traffic into subscribers, followers or clients.

Now, most people will contend that CRO is pretty much concerned with onsite activities. This will include optimizing landing page elements such as titles, pictures and CTAs. However, what many forget is that the buyer's journey is a long process — one that began before they even came to the site. How you interact with your visitors offsite will have a large say in how they respond to you on it. This is where lead nurturing steps in.

Lead nurturing is the process of developing a relationship with your audience through every step of their interaction with you. It goes without saying that lead nurturing strategies are indispensable for CRO. Consider these stats...

• Annuitas Group reported that nurtured leads made 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
• Gleanster found that lead nurturing helped convert 15%-20% of the "not yet ready to purchase" opportunities into sales.
• Similarly, Eloquoa stated that lead nurturing helped them improve conversion rates at every stage of the funnel.

In other words, lead nurturing can do wonders for your conversion efforts! Here are four strategies that can take your CRO to the next level.

Personalize the Content

Probably the biggest mistake companies commit when setting up a lead nurturing strategy is creating one set of blanket content which they then send to all the subscribers.

A better strategy is to classify leads under specific buyer personas (semi-fictional representations of customers) and then create content most valuable to each persona. A buyer persona can target a set of key attributes such as likes/dislikes, or problems that buyers are facing.

By segmenting leads based on common attributes, we can gain a better understanding of what subscribers are looking for and create more targeted content for them.

Personalized content is a proven winner too. A Forrester Research study found that 67% of the senior marketing executives surveyed in the US and Europe considered personalization to be important to their marketing studies.

Think Outside of the (In)box

Say lead nurturing and the first thing that comes into people's mind is drip email marketing. However, a holistic strategy will consider all the platforms it can reach people on; this is important as email open and click-through rates are very low. The average open rate according to MailChimp usually hovers around 20%, while click-through rates are under 3%.

Ask your subscribers to follow you on social media and post interesting, targeted content there. Set up paid retargeting campaigns and use dynamic website content to help your visitors get the most helpful, relevant information possible.

Follow-up ASAP and Frequently

The problem with following up later rather than sooner is that your reply begins to resemble a cold call/mail as you get further away from the time a person subscribed to your list. A subscriber may forget why they were interested in your product or service, or they may have found a competitor in the meantime. InsideSales reports that if you follow up with a lead within 5 minutes of subscription, you're 9 times more likely to convert them.

Continue reading %4 Lead Nurturing Strategies for Better Conversion Rate Optimization%

by Parth Misra via SitePoint

Three Design Patterns That Use Inversion of Control

For many developers, inversion of control (IoC) is a fuzzy concept, with little or no application in the real world. In the best of cases, it's considered just a plain equivalent of dependency injection (DI). The IoC = DI equation is only true, though, when both sides reference inverting the control of dependency management. While dependency injection is actually a well-known form of IoC, the truth is that IoC is a much broader software design paradigm, which can be implemented through several patterns. In this article we'll be taking a look at how dependency injection, the observer pattern, and the template method pattern implement inversion of control.

Continue reading %Three Design Patterns That Use Inversion of Control%

by Alejandro Gervasio via SitePoint