Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: Strategy & Design

Building Brand Credibility With Visual Design
Think about a brand you experienced in the past that made you feel happy. It could be a one-time thing, or maybe it’s a brand you’ve interacted with frequently. Think about the things that made you feel this way, like delightful products, friendly customer service, or honest communication. Brands can have a powerful impact on people’s lives and emotions, and it’s safe to say that they don’t go in hoping for a substandard experience.

Similar to a walking inside a store, your website or application is one of many gateways for your audience to engage with your brand. How do you think your audience feels about your brand right now?

Branding demands commitment. It demands a commitment to connect with people and stir their emotions. It demands a commitment to imagination. Many brands are only given one shot to engage people. Regardless of what you believe, people will quickly evaluate you and your brand when looking at your website or application.

The care you put into your website and brand reflect the attention you put into your product and services. Consider this: if your content is valuable, someone might assume you believe in clear communication, honesty, and care for customers. If your content is wasteful, contains broken links, or is surrounded by confusing navigation, someone might assume you lack a commitment to quality. Don’t do the latter.

Establishing and growing a brand—including a website or application —takes careful craftsmanship, commitment, and dedication. Brands are organic in nature, so they need to be cared for over time or they’ll eventually die off. The way in which you approach branding can allow you to speak volumes about your priorities, culture, trustworthiness, and level of expertise.

Nike—first and foremost—promotes beauty in their products to build brand credibility.

Is Visual Appeal Enough to Create a Trustworthy Brand?

Are there any intrinsic biases that we have as a species that prevent us from making calculated and good decisions? Yes, there are. Mainly beauty.

Beauty can influence whether we decide to walk into a store in person or explore deeper into a store online. It’s quite fascinating to observe how our behaviors and inclinations translate between offline and online existences.

As aesthetically-oriented humans, we are psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people. In fact, research conducted by the University of Melbourne found that visually attractive websites or applications were perceived as more trustworthy than those that were unattractive.

Credibility begins with aesthetics. Whether or not a website or application has credible content, a beautiful user interface can give people the impression that the brand pays attention to detail and quality.

If your organization does not value design at its core, your brand—and your organization—will inevitably fail.

However, visual appeal alone isn’t enough to make your brand trustworthy. Beauty is only skin deep, right? The largest source of frustration from people on the web is the inability to find the right information. What’s important here is that your website or application should not only have a professional appearance, but also should have both logical structure and friendly navigation.

Connecting Brand Value to Real People

Pretty website or application—check. Logical structure—check. Friendly navigation—check. Valuable content—uh oh! Ultimately people will still struggle to get what they came for if your content isn’t written properly and adds value.

Common Reasons Your Content Fails:
- It’s too vague, complex, or full of jargon.
- It’s either too shallow or too full of meaningless words.
- It’s incorrect, outdated, or unverified.
- It’s simply boring.
- Timing is off: it’s not customized to a user’s journey.
Even if you have information perfectly aligned the way your audience wants it, timing can also determine a content’s value. Providing the right amount of information at the right time is the key. A solid content strategy can help your brand find the right balance, presenting users with highly relevant information depending on their pain points.

Characteristics of Effective Content:
- Speaks to the human reader.
- Tells the reader what they need to know, when they need to know it.
- Reduces confusion through consistent, concise wording.
- Provides value and freshness.
Additionally, where appropriate, effective content shows personality, telling the audience that the brand has the capacity to truly appreciate what matters the most to people.

Simple & Effective Ways to Build Brand Credibility

With passion and attention to detail, you can design a website or application that expresses your brand while building credibility. Let’s go over a few of the commonly-used, proven design principles that can help build that brand credibility.

Design “with people”—not “for people”

It’s important to understand your audience and what their objectives are so that you can connect with them. Are they here to perform an action? Soak up information? Interact with a particular process? Rather than making risky assumptions, design alongside your audience to meet their needs. It’s not only good practice to be more inclusive with them, but it will also add more credibility to your brand if they feel like they are being heard.

I believe as creative professionals, it’s not only important for us to run designs through tests to get a quantitative measure, but also to test qualitatively with humans who will actually use the end-product.

Provide Clear Navigation

Whether it’s a website or an application, navigation is one of the critical ways to allow your audience to discover your brand’s products, services, and information they seek. Every action a person takes with your brand has risk.
Your audience may be saying:
- Is what I’m looking for here? No, wait… there? Umm…
- How does this work? Ohh… is this clickable?
- Where am I at? Ugh, forget it – I’ll google it.
Is your audience willing to take a risk and explore deeper into your brand to find value, or will they become frustrated and leave? Is your brand willing to take a chance on that? Good labeling practices can alleviate those risks.

Everything should be organized and labeled in a meaningful way that makes the most sense to your audience. Stick with conventions and do not get overly creative, unless you want to risk hindering brand exploration and reduce brand confidence.

Don’t Sacrifice Usability for SEO

Believe me, the last thing you want to do is write your content in such a way that’s only meant for a robot—e.g. Google—to read. Search engines are great at understanding the type of information you have, however, they cannot decide whether your brand is worth buying into. Only people can decide that.

Focus on a people-first content strategy and allow your brand to speak naturally to your audience. Search engine optimization (SEO) should not dictate your message. Instead, use keyword research to see what topics your audience is interested in, and hold off on optimization until this human-centric content has been written.

Present Information at the Appropriate Time

It’s important to guide your audience through every step of their journey efficiently. Throughout their journeys, information needs will vary. For example, a user may begin by trying to see if you offer the services they need. On another visit, they may be interested in learning about your company’s processes. If you deliver all of this information at once, the user could be overwhelmed or discouraged with difficulty finding the information they need. On the other hand, not showing enough information can make you look like you’re hiding something.

As part of your content strategy, consider the context you’re presenting to your audience and disperse your information accordingly.

Delight Your Users Whenever Possible

Delighting your audience may vary depending on the industry you are in, but make no mistake, great design can and should delight all the same. Whether it’s the subtle animation of a button, the unique style of a photo filter, or the clever integration of a Konami code easter egg— plan something different to surprise your audience with.

Often times, it’s the little things that make the most impact, while showing there are real people behind your brand. We’re all human—so let your brand connect with us.

Final Thoughts on Branding

Branding is about creating a difference, adding value, and connecting with people. Life’s purpose is the same thing, right? What story will your life—your brand—tell people next.

This article was originally posted by Mark Riggan on Medium.
May 3, 2019
Building a Custom Application to Reimagine Digital Strategy
One of the most influential life lessons that I follow every day is about planning—which teaches us that if you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail. You may wonder if planning really is that important. Uh, yes—yes, it is.

As part of a digital agency, planning is one of the core phases of every project we engage with. The ability for us to strategize as a team really feels like a game of chess. Every piece has a purpose, and if you plan well in advance, you just might make it out alive.

When it came to planning, communicating, and documenting data architecture, I noticed that our organization had some inefficiencies— repeated issues that chewed up both time and money. This past year, I sought out to design and develop a tool that would build in efficiency into our process—and look good while doing it too.

Digital strategy has always been about connecting people to information through well-informed navigation.

For most projects we’ve engaged with, there had been some level of documentation around research and data architecture. Who is this product for? What information are they seeking? How will they get to this information? Digital strategy boils down into a few primary areas.

3 Primary Areas of Digital Strategy

1. People

Until the robot apocalypse occurs (it’s only a matter of time), the products we design and develop are to be consumed and engaged by people. Whether we put together assumptions on personas or we conduct user research and interview actual people, it’s important that we document the characteristics of these people to help us understand them better. The better we understand, the more accurate our recommendations become. Empathy is a powerful emotion that we can use to connect with people.

2. Information

Information can come in many forms, such as products or services. They can also tell stories and evoke emotions. We use content strategy methodologies to define and organize content that audiences seek. More specifically, content models help document information with a brand and define the relationship between them. These relationships help shape data types, taxonomies, and templates.

3. Navigation

The bridge that connects people to the information they desire is through well-informed navigation. Even the most desired information becomes useless if people cannot ultimately find it. We frame our content and navigation around sitemaps. Sitemaps help us show connections between our content, giving us a bird’s eye view of the product. Keeping our content well-organized allows us to provide better design solutions.

Identifying Documentation Pain Points

After countless hours of reviewing documentation across various projects, I was able to audit how we were documenting and setting ourselves up for digital success. Spoiler alert—it wasn’t pretty.

Each project was almost entirely different in their approach to documentation, yet they all shared similar problems, like:
- Too many documents
- Too many file formats
- Too many locations
- Inconsistent branding
- Proprietary software or hardware
Needless to say, our documentation was fragmented and ineffective.

Challenges With Visual Sitemaps

One document that we typically produce in projects is called a visual sitemap. These are graphical representations of a website or applications content, and the connections made between them. What makes them unique is how we apply illustrations that best represent the kind of information each page may have. Visual sitemaps can give us a glimpse into user journeys, template architecture, and so much more. Often times, we print these sitemaps on a wide-format printer, which gives us a tangible poster for the team to review collectively.

As you can imagine, large-scale sites or apps can make for some impressively large visual sitemaps. When producing these sitemaps projects can end up wasting lots of paper and ink – especially when you account for multiple revisions.

Challenges With Standard Tools

Using Google Drive as our repository for documentation was ineffective due to cultural diversity in technology and inadequate governance policies. For example, documents were being created in various applications based on personal preferences, projects were not being shared properly to team members, and nothing appeared to be brand-compliant. Drive was supposed to be the answer for us, but wasn’t measuring up to our standards.

We also tried making visual sitemaps in Omnigraffle. Personally, I love Omnigraffle for making diagrams. However, if the designers weren’t available to make edits, the rest of our team could not help; Omnigraffle requires both macOS and a paid license.

To make matters worse, additional methods for documentation got out of hand. Some details were posted as activity notes in our project management platform (which almost always gets lost), while others were simply emailed between one another. As if that weren’t bad enough, we’ve ran across files that were stored on people’s desktops—or worse—in their trash bin.

If you were not part of the project team from the very beginning, getting involved became almost impossible. The landscape of how we documented and stored our plan of actions was chaotic. When you can’t effectively communicate with your team or even comprehend what is going on, you lose efficiency.

Designing a New, Inclusive Application

It was time to design an inclusive, customized app to promote improved team communication and strategy. I wanted to design and build an application that:
- Centralized documentation into a single location
- Allowed access cross-platform
- Automatically applied branding to all documentation
- Reduced dependency on 3rd party software
- Eliminated ink and paper waste
By creating an app to address the issues, my goals were:
- Reduce Costs: Remove time-intensive inefficiencies, and uncover problems quickly with real-time metrics.
- Increase Product Quality: Allow teams to spend more time making awesome products.
What if we could use technology to help us make better decisions and improve planning? By allowing the application to display real-time metrics— like page counts, page title lengths, and persona distribution—we could make well-informed decisions around the data architecture.

I branded and called the app Sapphire—for its clarity, strength, and beauty around providing value to us. Sapphire’s core value is about being a real-time data architecture planning tool that can help us strategize digital products at any scale.

Benefits of Sapphire

More Empathy for People in Design

Sapphire makes it very easy to define and explore personas for projects. Every project can create as many personas as necessary, with just the right amount of information at a glance. It’s incredibly easy for team members—especially designers—to empathize with a person’s goals or frustrations.

Better Organization for Content

Creating well-organized architecture around a project became effortless. Each project can have content broken into data types, taxonomies, templates, and pages. In fact, you can also create relationships between pages and people. This allows us to understand who our target audience truly is.

Clear Perspective on Navigation

In the past, we had to document the same information multiple times. The best part about Sapphire is that both branding and visual sitemaps are automatically generated in real-time. If I could get people to focus on the content and nothing else, Sapphire could handle the rest. Visual sitemaps are fully interactive, allowing anyone to explore pages and their architecture.

Inside the Single-Page App

In order to provide such a rich experience, I wanted to ensure Sapphire was using the latest technology. With performance being an important factor, I needed to choose technologies that were built for speed.

Sapphire was built on React—as both a progressive web app and single page app—and used Google Firebase for its NoSQL real-time database. Users were authenticated securely using Google Domain Authentication and was securely hosted through Google Cloud Hosting. All of these technologies were relatively easy to learn and integrate.

To power our intuitive sitemaps, I opted for jsPlumb framework over something like D3—primarily due to time constraints and the amount of effort required. I’ll admit, jsPlumb integrated extremely well with React and allowed me the power to customize as I needed to match the desired functionality.

Final Thoughts on Digital Strategy

Documentation allows teams to communicate and work together on projects of any scale, and digital strategy around architecture plays an important role in documenting how products should work. When we ignore documentation—or simply allow it to deteriorate over time— we are hurting our ability to communicate effectively.

By recognizing these problems, I was able to design, develop, and deploy a tool that helps us reimagine digital strategy and how we document data architecture. When we can work better together as a team, anything is possible. Make something people love!

This article was originally posted by Mark Riggan on Medium.
April 24, 2019
What’s the Future of Municipal Sites?

When I think about cities and city services, I can’t help but see them as user experience projects. As a UX-oriented person, maybe that’s just me being a hammer and seeing a UX nail, but as more and more diverse citizens rely on these municipal sites, city governments will have to take UX seriously to serve citizens in the future.

This UX perspective should extend from city hall buildings to services in the community to digital spaces like social media and city websites. I’m not only saying this because I think it’s the right thing to do, it’s also what citizens are increasingly coming to expect. Research from Accenture has shown that people are coming to expect more and more from digital government. Over three quarters of US citizens expect the same or better service from government websites as they do from commercial sites, and that number is growing. Some government institutions like the State of Georgia are catching on to this trend, though that appears to be more the exception than the rule.

Since we know how important city websites are, my user research team and I are always watching where these municipal sites seem to be headed. This can be a hard thing to pin down because there is so much variation in the execution of city websites, but here are a few trends that stand out.

Municipal Sites Will Focus on Findability

One of the hardest challenges of municipal sites is creating effective navigation systems. These sites struggle because they need to meet the needs of many user segments as well as the needs of many internal departments. Pick a city site at random, and chances are you will notice critical information buried in deep site structures. Deep structures aren’t necessarily always bad, but designing navigation for municipal sites is especially challenging because of the abundance of jargon in field. This in mind, here are specific ways municipal sites can improve findability:

Search

Search is an obvious way to get around the problems of navigation and hard-to-find information. While this might seem behind the times to include, you’d be surprised how many cities don’t have basic search aids like suggestions, autocomplete and spell check, much less filters to narrow results. With that said, many cities have begun promoting search even more by placing the search bar right in the middle of their home page. Take Las Vegas, for example:

If you want to promote search on your municipal site, put it front and center.

Intelligent Assistants

Many cities (and other government agencies) have begun to develop Alexa integration to help people find information. I have to commend these agencies for forward thinking, as I think voice interfaces are here to stay. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder how useful some of these tools actually are. It’s hard to accurately assess the value of these applications without some user testing, but my first question is: Which applications of these tools provide value and which are just shallow attempts to adopt a trendy technology?

For example, one of the apps currently available advertises providing information about the names of people in official positions. Put simply, that seems mostly useless. Other apps report to provide information about trash collection or street closure schedules. These tasks seem more practical. For example, imagine being able to instantly check whether you need to put your recycling out without having to consult a screen. I believe these tasks are closer to the types of things that people actually use intelligent assistants for: repetitive, fact-based information needs as opposed to subjective questions dependent on individual opinion. If I sound cautious here, it isn’t because I don’t believe voice interfaces could be useful–they could be–I’m just trying to stress the importance of basing these interfaces on real user needs.

“Get It Done” Wizards

Another approach is to present a navigation alternative by allowing users to select a catered guide to locate a page. These guides are usually presented as step-by-step processes (with numbered steps and all). In my view, though these are often presented as task wizards, they are typically just alternative navigation schemes that use actions as categories rather than the loosely-persona based navigations that city sites usually employ.

San Diego’s Get it Done feature: Users make choices moving from left to right and are linked to a page in the final panel.

These features provide an alternative finding method for users who struggle with or are not inclined to use other methods. That said, if a municipal site relies on these special guides to perform routine tasks, why not simply redesign the site’s information architecture so all categories are labeled as common actions? Are they simply bolting on alternative routes to popular content instead of simply designing their navigations around it?

City Sites Will Get Serious about Content Strategy

As a critical component of any website design, content strategy will also become a major focus of municipal sites in the coming years. And many of these sites have a ways to go—city web pages with a strong vision of their own strategy are more the exception than the norm. Here are some important ways that leading municipal sites will align their content strategy with actual user needs:

Timely Topics That Matter to Many Users

Cities need to prioritize and produce content that matters to the majority of their citizens. This means focusing on the key content strategy question: What do users actually come to the city website for? The answers should guide municipal site owners in deciding what content to prioritize.

One mistake I often see on city websites is there is too much focus on news or announcements (such as a press release of the mayor’s speaking engagements) rather than directly actionable information. Too often these news stories dominate screen space on multiple pages despite being of interest to only a small subset of users.

This doesn’t mean the latest news isn’t useful content, but municipal sites must prioritize common user needs over pure timeliness. For example, Boston’s site prioritizes things like parking meter schedules, street cleaning, and trash schedules over the “typical latest news” information—though these schedules should of course be kept up to date.

Embrace Citizen Communication

There is no more direct way to prioritize user needs than listening to those users in real time. Every municipal site understands the need for web-friendly ways for citizens to contact city officials, so most cities have webforms to request service, report things, and contact municipal employees—in addition to just posting phone numbers.

But beyond these standard methods, how else can municipal sites embrace citizen communication? Many cities (including Wichita, Virginia Beach, and Boston) have chat capabilities that allow citizens to immediately contact city employees for answers. These live chat sessions not only allow users to quickly express their views, but also reinforce that the city leaders are making time for a real person to listen to them. Additionally, they open lanes of communication for users who are not inclined to make a phone call or can’t wait for an email response.

The chat function on the Virginia Beach municipal site makes it easy for citizens to get quick answers.

It’s also worthwhile to engage users on social media channels like Twitter or Facebook in order to rapidly circulate important information and get citizen feedback. There’s nothing wrong with building a following by posting jokes or pictures of cute animals in the city, as these followers will later be able to receive your updates when something serious is happening. In addition, cities should develop a plan for how they will respond to unforeseen events on social media. For example, the city of Toronto famously found themselves on the spot after a picture of dead raccoon on a city sidewalk went viral.

The Future of Municipal Sites Is Now

Of the predictions made in this post, very few of the trends discussed rely on cutting-edge technology. Instead of some sci-fi dreamscape driven by neural integration with digital systems or holographic imagery, the future of municipal sites will depend on strong search capabilities, user-centered content strategy, and social engagement—all best practices you can implement right now.

To learn more about how government websites can better serve citizens, please visit our government services page.

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April 16, 2019
Marketing Automation and eCommerce: The Other Half of a Whole

During the wonderful pleasure of checking out of a eCommerce website, something shocking happened: I became distracted. What was the website’s shortcoming? A poorly placed call-to-action button? Some user experience faux pas that made me feel under-appreciated as a consumer? A page load time that took milliseconds longer than the time I felt like waiting?

Actually, there was no digital culprit. My wife came in with the groceries. So I stopped shopping to help her put away food.

Even with craftsman-like attention to every nuance of customer experience, life can and does find a way to distract us from purchases we intend to make. In a world of digital noise and constant demands for attention, we shouldn’t be surprised there are so many things that prevent customers from completing an order. I’d argue there are more things that prevent an order from happening than help it.

Adobe Digital Insights estimated only 30% of desktop shopping carts resulted in an order (dropping down to 19% on mobile devices). That same study also surveyed consumers about how they source the best deals for the holidays. Most agreed on email and search ads were the best methods, while social media and app push notifications were the worst.

Whatever methods they use, eCommence retailers need to dig deep and command attention to break through to new sales goals. Constant awareness, presence, and time-sensitive actions are all must-do actions to push sales higher and make people remember why they need that thing you offer.

One Half of a Whole: eCommerce and Marketing Automation

I’m going on the record here: There should be no eCommerce without Marketing Automation.

You know how every movie with ghosts theorizes that spirits come back to haunt us because they have unfinished business on our earthly plane? This is exactly how you should think about marketing automation—as a reanimated specter that reaches from the great beyond and will not be silenced until you complete your transaction (at 15% off with promo code GHOSTLY15).

Here’s the bad news, much of marketing automation is a guessing game. You choose arbitrary dates, subject lines, and emojis to make your email or message appear the most relevant at what you hope is the most relevant time. Many attempts at reaching out to customers will fall flat, but the few glimmering diamonds that manifest will make your marketing automation worth it.

Part of the reason marketing automation is attractive is that robots are very good at consistency. Tell your automation app what kind of simple iterations of repeatable messages you want to send, and you can easily test all kinds of variables to see what drives the most responses. By measuring the experience through automation, you can focus on the results and use them to inform every aspect of your marketing work.

“Hello, FIRSTNAME, would you like to buy this eCommerce CONSUMERPRODUCT in FAVORITECOLOR?”

Some basic automations to get you started include:

Cart Abandonment with Discount Offers

This is the most essential marketing automation available. Here’s how it works: someone adds something to their cart, they abandon the cart without purchasing, and your automation app emails them automatically with an offer of a discount on that particular product. You can try this tactic both as an abandoned cart reminder (pinging the customer to finish their purchase) or as a special discount offered at a certain cart threshold (thus encouraging them to add an additional item to their order).

Make no mistake: if someone has added an item to their cart, they want it. They are on the precipice of purchasing, but anything from a crying child to a sudden desire for a ham sandwich could prevent them from making that decision. So your offer has to break through that and encourage them to finish purchasing the item you already know they want.

Activity-Based Engagements

Some customers may not even reach the add-to-cart stage and are still browsing. Here the objective is to remind them of their shopping experience based on particular items they viewed or categories of items that they looked at (e.g. sweaters or video games). Again, tying this to a specific offer or discount based on a total purchase price will encourage more purchases. Don’t forget the power of deadlines to produce results (e.g. “This discount only available for the next 59 minutes.”). Making specific promotional codes expire after a certain period of time drives customers to make a faster decision to avoid losing their deal.

Again, people look for something to nudge them toward a particular decision they already want to make. Make it easy on these weary souls by telling them this purchase is the right move through automations that remind and reaffirm.

New and Trendy

Fear of Missing Out (F.O.M.O) is a powerful siren’s call that easily causes dollars to leave wallets. Framing a temporary trend works with natural herd mentalities can drive more people to do what you want them to do: convert. Getting people caught up in the moment of a seasonal trend introduces a time-honored sales hysteria that can catapult your sales to new heights.

Target customers with frequent purchases from the site to make them aware of new product offerings, trends, styles, and more. Note that it’s important to employ multiple marketing automation flows to relentlessly pursue your target until they succumb to the inevitability of their not-yet-made sale. Place someone into a flow to make them aware of a particular trend, and when they don’t purchase, add them to another automation that makes them a compelling discount offer.

Marketing Automation for Ads: Remarketing

The main challenge of marketing automation is it typically requires an initial form conversion to reengage customers. While it’s not technically MA, dynamic product listing ads allow you to show particular items to your customers via a feed. This reminds them of that particular item they simply forgot to actually purchase. Similar remarketing options exist across social media that act as a touchpoint for bringing people back into the fold.

“Hey, don’t mind me as I sit here and watch you eat. Also I love you.”

Unlike marketing automation where you’re using email to physically place a message into something they own (their inbox), you can be more aggressive with remarketing without offending people. Aggressive remarketing can be annoying, but it preys on your sometimes chance of clicking the ad and purchasing the product.

It’s like a loyal dog that likes to watch you eat dinner. The dog can annoy you, but you can’t get that mad at him. It’s in his nature, and he’s super cute. And while you won’t give him your people food all the time, you might give some of your people food sometimes. And he will wait you out because he knows the rules too.

In conclusion, you will never win by hoping your customers don’t get distracted from making a purchase. By relying on a strong marketing automation strategy, you can engage with distracted customers in the midst of their crowded headspace and win them over with the right message. If you have questions about how to implement a marketing automation or eCommerce plan, feel free to contact us.

April 4, 2019
The Top 5 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Website Speed
A colleague just shared a URL with you, his message reading “you gotta check this out!” The URL promises to lead you to a beautiful new website for a company that created a software tool that could save your life. You eagerly click the link and wait. One, two, three seconds go by as the page struggles to load. Before your frustration gains any more momentum, you close the page. Sound familiar?

This example illustrates why site speed analysis should be STEP ONE of every conversion optimization project. And as the Internet becomes even more entwined in our work, entertainment, and everything else, your customers will become even less patient for any delay in opening your page.

Before launching into ways to improve the speed of your website, here’s one key note about website speed: there’s a difference between Page Load Time and Page Interactive Time. Page Load Time means “the length of time until every element on the page is done loading”, while Page Interactive Time means “length of time until the site is usable.” The latter is the more important metric to pay attention to.

Now, here are the top causes of site-slowing and what you can do to fix them:

#1: Optimize Your Images

Large images are the culprit for a lot of the ‘weight’ of many websites. Website weight, for our purposes, is measured in bytes—the fewer bytes the browser has to download, the faster the download can happen and the more quickly your users will see your content. This is a great argument for optimizing how you use images on your site.

First, it’s important to consider how essential each image is to the success of your website. Well-placed images can communicate loads of information, but make sure every one of them is worth the real estate. Also, if you ever find yourself encoding text in an image asset, stop and reconsider. Text-in-images delivers a poor user experience – the text is not selectable, not searchable, not zoomable, nor accessible. Web fonts are always a better choice for text.

Once you’ve chosen the most important images for your site, make sure their size isn’t adding a ton of weight for your website to load. There are dozens of tools you can use to adjust image size, but here is a short list:
- Photoshop – open your image and choose the “Save for Web” option. The program includes an image quality slider so you can see the visual trade-offs.
- Smush.it – this is a free online uploader that creates a zip archive of your optimized images.
- Kraken – subscription-based image optimization software.
#2: Compress Your Website Files

Compressing your website will increase site speed by reducing the size of the HTTP response. You may need help to address this because both compression and deflation happen on the server side. The most common compression solution is GZIP and fortunately, almost all web servers support it. To see if your website is already GZIPPED, run this simple test: GIDZipTest. If you’re curious about how GZIP works, check out this video by the Google Webmasters themselves.

#3: Use a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed system of servers which are deployed over multiple data centers across the Internet. A CDN serves content to users from the most highly available server in order to deliver the best performance. This makes a CDN a great speed improvement if you have a high traffic website. Some of the most popular CDNs include:
- Amazon CloudFront
- MaxCDN
- CacheFly
- CloudFlare
In addition to serving content from a CDN, you should also serve your static content (images, javascript, and CSS files) from a cookieless domain, backed by a CDN. Why cookieless domains? Every time a browser sends an HTTP request, it has to send all associated cookies that have been set for that domain and path along with it. Because static files don’t need to be accompanied by cookies, you can decrease latency by serving these static resources from a cloud domain that doesn’t serve cookies. You can accomplish this by using Amazon CloudFront or Rackspace.

#4: Implement Browser Caching

The browser cache is a temporary storage location on a user’s computer which stores files downloaded to display your website. The user’s browser can display your website faster by retrieving your site’s images, stylesheets, javascript, or multimedia content from the cache rather than having to download all this content again when they come back to your site.

To ensure your site uses cached files, you may need your hosting provider to help you install a caching solution. Here are the top three caching programs:
- Redis
- CloudFlare
- Memcached
While we’re talking about hosting providers, it’s worth noting that not all web hosts are created equal. Indeed, many of the top web hosts include all the server-side speed optimization services you need. If you have a decent amount of traffic, skip the budget web hosts and research which hosting provider best suits your needs.

#5: Minimize Redirects

There are several types of redirects, all useful when you want to point a user’s browser to a different URL. The most widely used, a 301 redirect, is the preferred way to change your site structure without losing valuable SEO. The downside is that lots of redirects stacked together will confuse the browser, slowing it down as it wades through the old destinations to get the new ones.

The Lazy Optimizer’s Guide to Accelerating Your Website

If these steps seem overwhelming, there is a quick and easy path: Google provides expert advice on exactly what’s slowing your pages down and what you should do to fix the issues using its Page Speed Insights tool. Just type in your URL and the tool will ‘score’ your site speed on mobile and desktop.

On the Internet, things change all the time, and these best practices are no exception. To get the latest and greatest tips on website speed, check out the Google Developers guide. Happy optimizing!
March 28, 2019
Are You Looking at the Trees or the Landscape for Your Web Project?
Trees, Forests, Landscapes

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve heard the phrase “He can’t see the forest for the trees” to describe someone so focused on specific details that he misses the big picture. Rather than repeat this cliche again, I’d like to discuss a third level I consider more important—the landscape, or how we choose to shape a natural environment to meet our needs.

Let me explain with an example. Recently, I was looking over a heavily-wooded property with a neighbor and discussing ideas for how to landscape it. We agreed the property could be greatly improved by removing many of the trees. However, when my neighbor pointed out which trees he would remove, they were the exact opposite of the ones I would! I realized even though we were gazing over the same property, we had dramatically opposed visions for the new landscape. We agreed on the need for change, but our desired end results could not have been more different.

Trees Are Features. The Landscape Is the Objective.

So, what does this have to do with planning complex digital projects? In this landscaping comparison, we need to think of trees as features—they give shade, add visual interest like color or shape, provide privacy, offset architecture, and so on. The right combination of trees, applied as part of an overall plan, can immensely enhance a landscape. However, features aren’t everything—they need to serve a purpose. Are you focused on individual features (the trees), or do you have a clear vision of the end business objective (the landscape)?

We often have new clients who want to begin the discussion at the feature level—take this one out, speed that one up, redesign another one. We always back up and ask: “What business objective are you trying to achieve?” The answer is usually some benefit to the bottom line like increasing revenue through growth in market share, or decreasing cost by leveraging technology more efficiently.

Ask Five Whys

An excellent exercise for zooming out from the feature level is to ask “why?” Then ask it again, and again, and again, until you have the objective-level perspective you need. Asking why through several iterations—I’d suggest five—can help to get at the real root of what you are trying to accomplish. Let’s try out this technique with an example that’s common in our business:
- We need a new content management system (CMS).
Why?
- Because it will make it easier to generate content for the website.
Why?
- Because our current content management system (CMS) is outdated and hard to use.
Why?
- Because we built it 7 years ago and it hasn’t kept up with the technology that people now expect.
Why?
- There has been no investment in our website for the last several years.
Why?
- Because then we were focused on growth by merger and acquisition, but we are now in a position to focus on organic growth in web traffic.
Look at the evolution—what starts as a question of how hard or easy it is for someone to use a tool ends as a discussion of the overall business goal that tool supports. Now we we know what we really need to achieve!

Next, Ask What

Using this big-picture vision, it’s time to begin from the top and go in the opposite direction, asking “what is needed for that” rather than “why.”
- We want to grow organic traffic on the website.
What is needed for that?
- A solid base of structured content, with a plan to continually generate fresh content.
What is needed for that?
- A content strategy identifying what content our users crave and how to produce it.
What is needed for that?
- Someone in the organization dedicated to defining and curating online content.
What is needed for that?
- A team of subject matter experts and content contributors working through an approval process coordinated by the above person.
What is needed for that?
- An Information Architecture to structure and organize the content generated above.
What is needed for that?
- A governance process defining editorial workflow, approval levels, and communications guidelines.
What is needed for that?
- An online toolset for the content contributors, including a modern Content Management System.
What is needed for that?
- Training in the governance process and using the new CMS.
What is needed for that?
- An SEO strategy to make sure search engines are picking up the content.
What is needed for that?
- Analytics to monitor and review the effectiveness of the online content and SEO strategy.
Notice how the answer still includes the original requirement of a new content management system, but now that CMS is only part of a more comprehensive solution. What’s more, now the company will be much more likely to effectively use their new CMS to achieve their larger business objectives.

Choose the Landscape, Then the Trees

In terms of our original metaphor, remember to think of your objective as the landscape you want rather than a forest of random trees (features) to be addressed individually. To guide you in this process, use the “Why?” and “What is needed for that?” questions to lead you to the strategy you need. This lets you decide each feature for a specific reason, letting them all combine to form an elegant landscape that will stand the test of time.
March 5, 2019