What’s a custom 404 page? In a perfect world, nobody types URLs incorrectly. Your internal links work perfectly, inbound links don’t get broken when you alter the site structure, and money grows on trees. In the real world, visitors occasionally end up on pages that don’t exist and are given the “404 File Not Found” [...]
What is a styled location map? This is where we stretch the definition of 5 minutes a little. When you’re familiar with the mapping app we’re going to use, it will take 5 minutes to design and publish a map. The first and second times will probably take longer. Many organisations publish a standard Google [...]
What’s a swipe file? Designers, developers and copywriters often keep a swipe file or grab-bag of content that’s impressed them and is likely to be useful in future. It might be an entire website, a code snippet, an article, or just a particularly striking headline.
What are visitor tasks? A list of the three most important tasks visitors want to achieve on your website will focus your content and help make your site more usable.
What? Let’s be honest. As website managers, we all have pieces of non-performing content on our sites. A/B testing is a quick and free way of testing small changes to your content to improve performance. It can be used to increase clickthroughs, subscriptions, sales, or any other action you’d like visitors to perform.
Why? Online or off, readers cling to the concrete. They like concrete nouns and verbs, but adjectives send them to sleep. Adjectives reduce the impact of nouns and verbs because they weaken facts, force people to think, and can make the reader wonder what you’re trying to hide.
Why? Web users are incredibly impatient nowadays, and they abandon slow-loading sites in a matter of seconds. To put it bluntly, when there’s a billion enticing sites just a click away, slow pages are irritating and boring.
