Use your web space efficiently with copy relevant to customers

Summary:  When writing product copy, consider the page where the copy will appear in, note what you want the web user to do in that page.  Then attract, interest and build desire in potential customers through giving relevant information on why the product will be useful to them.  You have just a few seconds to do so, so put the meat right in. Whimsy copy is useless and turns off customers.

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Finally, one local coupon site has stopped using psycho and useless product copy.  Hallelujah!
Another site who does this practice has hidden the weird copy in the middle of the product page.
 The only local coupon site that I've seen who used copy optimally is Cashcash.  The others were just yikes.  (Or maybe I'm not subscribed so I missed it.)

As a loyal customer and a copywriter for usability, I always cringed at their weird product copy.

Example:

 ... Traditionally, lasers have been used to point out important portions of slideshow presentation, to shrink one's children, or as a super villain's go-to weapon of mass destruction.  Find out what good things lasers can do for you with...   ?

This is from an email I received just this June.  

As of today,  their site only has 1 product with weird copy, the others are more efficiently written.  

 The writer definitely knows how to write, but it is big waste of web real estate.  I click these ads when I want to buy something, and I expect the blurb on the email to tell me:  

• a bit more about the product,
• if the feature I'm excited about is mentioned, or 
• if  I have a question, seeing it answered immediately on the snippet under the attractive picture.

Any of these would really excite me to click "View It" to lead on to the product page.  And of course, if all information and terms are satisfactory to me, I would buy at that very moment.

In writing copy, let us treat each page as having its own objective.  Then we write according to that objective. In the photo I posted above, the conversion objective is:  to click on the View It! button that leads to the product page.  I am not clicking to read on shrinking one's children.  Truth to tell, since I did not glance at the title, I didn't know what the product was.  If I liked the picture and price, I would click the button, but the desire for buying is held off until the next page, when desire to buy could have been built directly on the email received, even before landing on the product page.  Time is wasted.

Unfortunately, hurt as it may, but as your buyer too, I can say that most of your sales come from the pictures, the price, the no-nonsense product headline, and in the product page.  But that blurb, it turns me off, and I'm sure a lot of us cringe at those blurbs because it's (sorry) quite cheesy, given the context.  In the past, there were instances when I see people in my timelines snickering about the product copy.  Many times, I have been impatient with this copy as it is not helpful and quite annoying and takes up my time when all I want is to learn more about the product.  

 I am not sure if it's a management policy to write this way, or a personal preference of the writer, but whoever decided to stop it, well, props to you.




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Check for 'False Right Margins'

It used to be web conversion/ usability people had to check just for 'false bottoms'. You know, when there's this considerable space just somewhere below the "above the fold" on your monitor. And people think it's the end of the page and they leave. If your Buy or Sign Up bottom lies below your false bottom, you'll be in deep trouble.

Today, I was surfing on my phone and came upon a page where I had to register. I was used to this phone being able to fit pages. So I registered, and wondered why the form only asked for my first name and not my family name. Attributing this to design error, I filled in my whole name in the First Name field and proceeded to click 'Register'. After waiting for some time and nothing was loading on my phone, I realized the page was incomplete. I scrolled up and down again, and everything looked fine. Later, I found that if I scrolled to the right, the other fields were there, such as Family Name.

Fed up, I left the Registration Form.

This got me thinking, with lots more people surfing the net compared to 3 years ago, conversion and usability people should now also monitor the right margins, since yes, phones are narrower than your trusted computer or iPad. Maybe this can be adjusted too by not putting too much space apart for each field? Or you can also do the stuff you used to to avoid 'false bottoms' only this time apply it to the right side of the page. Just do this sparingly since people do not usually care to scroll to the right, especially from a phone.

And of course, always check how your web page looks like from the different mobile units. You lose valuable conversions, like sales or sign-ups with this tiny oversight.

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Web redesign for a development org site

Our website is undergoing a major redesign and I can't help but be excited. Obviously, geeky me tingles on matters related to these.

When I first heard of the redesign, I immediately looked up the group contracted to do the redesign and I found a simple white website with forms. Most people might think why would I hire these people with a plain white website? Me, after checking their rather spartan landing page, I grew excited and knew this group would know exactly what to do in giving our site a much needed rejuvenation.

I saw the designs today and wasn't disappointed.

1. Besides the initial professional, modern look, the first thing your eyes will wander to are the prominent nav bars for the types of users that visit the site. You will immediately see buttons for journalists, NGOs, academe, etc. People can immediately click whatever group you're from and from there find options what your groups needs.

2. Search button more prominent at the right. People instinctively look for it at the top right. Great thing is after clicking there are scrolldown filters according to country, item needed, etc.etc.

3. Landing pages now have stories right up at the top of the nav bar. Even for a worldwide development org, stories on how help is extended to countries are always welcome. People understand stories more so that's a big plus. Hyfalutin project documents are also easily available for groups whose main interest is to look up projects.

4. Top traffic landing pages, aka most in-demand pages, were prominently linked also at the top of the nav bar.

5. New items are easily seen, such as newest articles, publications and events.

Overall, I am very pleased that the site not only looks great, but is easy to use for visitors to get what they need. i noticed there isn't a favorites box, but I expect it'd look really hodgepodge with the assortment of opportunities, media releases, etc. that different groups of people need. Great design is when web owners are happy with their site, plus users are happy because it is easy to get what they need. Yup, great job!



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Office Newsletters: Simple cuts it.

I recently made a very plain office newsletter and received feedback about it.

- Everything in plain white
- Color highlights for contrast are deep blue for the masthead at the top, and a rich pacific blue to outline highlights right below it.
- Text and photos in plain horizontal layout
- Sections separated by light gray dots
- Lots of white space
- Fonts used are plain arial, georgia and verdana

Everything else was black text on white space.

Interestingly, one of our readers emailed the next day. She thanked us for the very easy to read newsletter and said it was a very friendly way of communicating updates. (Thank you also for writing in.)

So yeah, we all agonize how a newsletter should look like. We experiment with all these designs and boxes and fillers, looking for that perfect combination of colors, fancy fonts, etc.

But really, it is the reader who will tell you what that perfect combi is, so listen/ intelligently guess what is easiest for them.

Sample screenshot:

Yes, the look really is just email  with pictures.

I intentionally made the pic small, for privacy reasons.

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Pilipinas Kay Ganda Website Disaster Could Have Been Totally Avoided

I had the usual reaction over the new Department of Tourism campaign, about using a slogan that is not immediately recognizable to its target audience, blablabla, and that was the end of it.

My hair stood on its end though when I heard the news that the Pilipinas kay Ganda website URL, beautifulpilipinas.com, would lead to a porn site if you change one letter in the URL.

I was wondering why this mishap happened. Ok fine, I admit I'm indignant about it.

For us web developers who are also concerned about Usability and Search Engine Optimization, I believe URLs should be carefully chosen.  It represents yourself, organization, and in this case, your country.  New website names should be chosen :

1)  to immediately tell what the site is about
2)  for ease of use of the target users
3)  for easy finding of search engines or SEO

1)  Immediately tell what the site is about


I encourage anybody who wants to set up any webpage, whether a free blogspot account or a paid domain to carefully think over and list a bunch URLs.  Your URL or website name should clearly state what your website is all about.  For beautifulpilipinas, fine.  That passed that step.

2)  My next consideration, for usability:

• Is your chosen name easy to remember?  
• Is it short or at least an acceptable length?
• Did you put in dashes, underscores or numbers that might confuse your searchers?  Note that these are fine, as long as kept to a minimum and easy to remember.
• Are you using spellings that might confuse your searchers?
• Are there synonyms, same words with different meaning, that might confuse your users?

And the last 2 points is where things went awry.  Pilipinas, that stands for a country, can also stand for persons, the Pilipina. Westernize the words. Filipinas is also used to stand for our country, and course our women are more popularly called Filipina here and in other countries.

3.  Optimize for Search Engines  

To optimize your URL for search engines, it is as simple as following steps 1 and 2. But there are other things your web-developer should do in this step, and that could have avoided the disaster of the tourism website.

For the web developers-marketers part, we practice a standard procedure of searching out the potential URLs that can be used where we find:

-  related keywords being searched

-  how many searches have been done for the searched keywords in the past month or year

-  etc. etc.

This way, you can advice the client what may happen when using a particular URL, and let the client choose what suits the purpose.

Some people would prefer using the barely searched keyword, and is willing to take on the challenge of  getting people to visit. If people pick it up, then only you will be identified with that keyword.  Other people prefer to be safer, and will pick names with keywords already being searched.  

With this step alone, you will quickly see there are no searches for beautifulpilipinas.  Free advice:  Since the Philippines' tourism has been around for sometime you can think up and search for more words that people are actually using now when they want to visit or vacation in the Philippines.  Then you can think more of what words can be used for your taglines, etc.

Now search for beautifulfilipinas and you will see the obvious.  Lots of searches, and other keywords with searches are "beautiful filipina", "beautiful filipina women", and "dating filipina".  By now, even if you cannot imagine these could lead to a porn site, you will at least get that the country's synonym stands for its women as well.  And it is easy to read, what is being pertained to here is another kind of tourism industry that is not so wholesome as the Department of Tourism would prefer.
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Looking at it another way, the real winner in this situation is the website owner of  beautifulfilipinas.com because, by applying these simple steps mentioned above, now an entire country is looking at their homepage.  Lucky bastards.

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How Many Potential Customers Can a Fastfood Website Lose?

I have griped before about fastfood websites in  the Philippines to cut the fancy shmancy features of their websites because their audience is most likely hungry.  I will repeat, hungry or craving people need only

1)  A BIG delivery hotline number

2)  Prices of available items

3)  Posting your delivery charges in a prominent place is a nice touch.

And all the info should load immediately.

Anything more that takes up loading time and click time is unnecessary.  

Specially, if the food you're offering is in season, your website should at least be up and have a contact number.  

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The other day, my sister sent me an SMS message asking me for the delivery number of Chow King.  It was very hot and Chow King's halo-halo seemed like a good idea.  She knew I'm online most of the day so it's easy for me to look and text her back.  Lo and behold!  The site was down (still is today).  Tsk tsk.  I'm sure it's not just my sister who wanted to order from them and will use the net to look for the number.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, who have googled chowking for their delivery number.  

Yeah, let's see...  To be pakielamera about it, let's demonstrate to Chow King how much profit they would have missed.

Google searches for this month:

Chowking hotline -       1 000

chowking philippines -  1 900

chowking menu -         2 900  and drumroll, please

chowking -                49 500

Who would type the words "hotline" and "menu"?  People who want to BUY. As in, right now.  Conversions (or that final sale) are SURE when they type hotline and menu.  They are not out to get something from Chowking, like applying for a job, but they want to PAY Chow King for food.  And they will not take days or multiple visits to decide whether they want to buy halo-halo.  They want to order and pay right now.

Put a conservative estimate of percentage from that audience that typed in the plain "chowking" .  How much of that 49,500 searched to order food from them?  Now multiply by average order in Pesos.

It's halo-halo time, Chow King people.  You should have at least a 1-page website up.

Last free tip:  Add to your "sorry for the inconvenience page" your BIG contact number. And if you're really nice, why not add some food items and prices at the side as well, instead of that expensive website being totally worthless and punishing customers to look for your number elsewhere.  

If you are really sorry, you should give the people what they need even if you still don't have those spinning pics up.

And if you stumbled upon my post looking for their contact information, Chow King's delivery number is 9-8888.

Some Basic Online Work Words that I Will be Discussing

Here are my most favorite topics about online work that I will be discussing time and time again.  If anything, I have started on some posts already.  This is posted for those who intend to learn more about working online.  This post will be expanded time and time again, depending on trends that will commonly crop up when you are an Online Filipino Worker.

SEO - is Search Engine Optimization. What you do on or for your website to be found when searched on Google and the other search engines.  This includes fixing the website to be easily scanned by search spiders, posting great content in the site, posting informative SEO articles in other websites, getting other sites to link to your website, etc. etc.

Web Usability - making your website easy to use for the internet user.  This involves:  putting simple and understandable information,  making choosing options easy, clear info what will happen when a user clicks this or encodes that, having the most important element, such as a button or table, in the right place easily seen by the user, etc.

Web Analytics - collection and analysis of all the data happening in your website.  Use the data to improve your users' experience and your sales or sign-ups.

Web Conversion - When your users convert/ do something in favor of your company's objective, such as buying, signing up as member, subscribing to your newsletter, etc.

Conversion Rate Optimization - All the efforts you do to increase the percentage of sales/ conversions vis-a-vis the number of visitors in your website.  To optimize conversions, you usually tweak your website's usability, copywriting, testing, analytics, etc.

Web Copywriting - Writing persuasive text in your web page that will make readers convert/ do something in favor of your website's objectives.

A/B Testing/  Multivariate Testing - Presenting to users different versions of 1 webpage to see which version leads to more conversions/ sale/ sign-ups/ etc. Testing which web page version is the most effective.

There are other virtual online work such as programming, admin tasks, customer service and the like, but I will focus more on the ones above as these are the main tasks I do.


Other words I will usually use:

If I say traffic, most likely I am not referring to the heavy volume of cars on the road, but the number of people that pass through the website.  These are the same people I refer to when I say, audience, users, readers, etc.

Copy is not nicking your classmates answers in the test, but the written text of a web page, advertisement, etc.


A little request from OFW Din: If you liked this post, please click the cute buttons below the title. It will let Google and the others know you sent me some love.

Why Do Subscribers Need to Enter their Email Address Again?

I'm a little weirded out.

I'm a subscriber of several conversion optimization newsletters.   I read in one of the newsletters I received that there was a nice webinar and I wanted to sign up.  So I clicked the link, and a long form flashes in front of me.  I had to fill up this long form,  when I already gave away this info when I subscribed to them.  Truth to tell, I've filled up this form for them gazillions of times already.

I am mostly patient with things like this.  It's disappointing though, because if you're a very much established conversion optimization company, why are your forms not optimized to convert?

Fastfood Websites: Drop the Fancy Flash!

It's year 2010 and websites are expected to load quickly.  If your websites are not loading quickly, you may be losing customers.


The family has been clamoring for lunch and we are all hungry.

I went over to visit the KFC delivery (Philippines) website and looked forward to eating their yummy chicken for lunch.


At the front page:  Waiting for Flash... waiting for flash... waiting for flash.  I have 4 files downloading so it may be affecting the speed of the flash.   Hmm....

I clicked menu hoping to find the food offers and prices.

Again,  waiting for Flash... waiting for flash... waiting for flash. Getting impatient here...

Waiting for Flash... waiting for flash... waiting for flash.

Hurgh!  All I wanted is the name of the food item and the price!  Not worth it.  Click X.

Website developers,  Usability workers:  Fastfood websites invite the interest of HUNGRY PEOPLE.  They want quicker results more than the usual.  Remove all elements that bog down speed, such as flash items. 

It's a simple matter of putting yourselves in the shoes of the user.

Free Usability Tip:  If you really want to include the pretty flash pages for a fastfood site:

• On your home page, list the most popular food items and the prices and put your phone number in big letters
• At the side, put a navigational menu to links that contain all your pretty pages. 
  

HURGHHH.
Sorry but I'm really hungry.

I've been checking the other fastfood delivery sites just now, may require another post.  HURGG!