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Multivariate Testing in Action: Five Simple Steps to Increase Conversion Rates

The attention span on the Web has been decreasing ever since Google had arrived and changed the rules of the game. Now with millions of results available on any topic imaginable, the window to grab a visitor’s attention has decreased significantly (in 2002, the BBC reported it is about 9 seconds). Picture yourself browsing the Web: do you go out of your way to read the text, look at all the graphics, and try to thoroughly understand what the page is about? The answer is most likely to be a straight “no.” With bombardment of information from all around, we have become spoiled kids, not paying enough attention to what a Web page wants to tell us.

We make snap decisions on whether to engage with a website based on whatever we can make out in the first few (milli)seconds. The responsibility for making a good first impression lies with designers and website owners. Given that the window of opportunity to persuade a visitor is really small, most designs...
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Smashing Book 2 Is Coming: Add Your Name To The Book!

We’ve got some exciting news: the printed Smashing Book 2 is coming. We will launch pre-orders in January 2011 and will start shipping the book in February 2011. We are just putting the final touches on the brand new book, and we are confident that it will be a valuable, timeless and affordable book for you, our dear readers, and all designers and developers worldwide.

After much difficulty with the first book, we have learned our lessons: Smashing Book 2 will have a much better stitched binding, a hardcover, more pages and a bit larger in size.

Our Readers Deserve Credit

It’s not unusual for authors to dedicate their books to people they care about: loved ones, family or perhaps friends or colleagues. In our case, we would like to dedicate this new book to all of our readers: you. But we don’t want to just do it with a short acknowledgment in the preface. Anyone could do that! We have a slightly better idea.

We would like to print the names of...
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Designing for Content Management Systems

Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. However, most clients these days want to be able to manage their own content, so most designers will find that some, if not all, of their designs end up as templates in some kind of CMS.

By considering the CMS as you design, you can maintain far more control over the final output. If your designs will be implemented and integrated into the CMS by a developer, then taking control at the design phase will help you to keep control over the design as opposed to leaving decisions to the developer or the content editors.Know your enemy

Content Management Systems vary greatly in how much control they give the designer and the content editors. As a designer, you should first find out how much control over the templating system of...
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Where Have All The Comments Gone?

Years ago, the online design community was a thriving conversationalist — of sorts — through the comment sections across the community. It was through leaving meaningful comments that the thought-provoking ideas presented and discussed in a post were examined by others whose perspective and experiences may have provided them with a slightly different take.

The continued dissection and discussion of the topic expanded the dialog far beyond the initial post, challenging and redirecting ideas and allowing dialog to evolve; it showed a certain level of critical thinking from within the community. We still have sites that are design conversationalists, but unfortunately they are rather exceptions. And it seems that the problem occurs not only in the design community, but in other areas as well.

Since those good old days, things have taken an unexpected turn. Comments are becoming less and less expansions on the ideas presented, and more and more just simple offerings...
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How To Use the “Seven Deadly Sins” to Turn Visitors into Customers

Since the beginning of time, people have exploited the human desire to sin so that they could achieve their goals. Finding out what causes people to sin helps us understand the triggers which prompt people to take an action. The Web has made it even easier to exploit these tendencies to sin, in order to build user engagement and excitement about your service or product. In this article we’ll show examples of how successful companies exploit the tendency to conduct all the famous Seven Deadly Sins, and in turn generate momentum with their website visitors. Ready? Let’s roll.Sin #1: Pride

Pride is defined as having an excessively high opinion of oneself. You must remember someone from your school days who had an extremely high sense of their personal appearance or abilities. That’s pride at work. On the Web, this sin will help you sell your product. Every website visitor wants to be associated with a successful service that other people might find...
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