Intentionally. Online Business System Design

A big part of having your own company is the ability to decide what type of culture you want to cultivate. We’ve had a lot of conversions over the months about the type of company we want Intentionally to become. It continues to evolve, particularly as the company grows and incorporates additional people into the fold (with their beliefs and values), but we’ve tried to be very intentional (hence the name) about the values the company holds. Below are some of those values - some are pretty normal, but some in our opinions are really unique and really exciting to us.

Do the right thing at all times.

• Through the choices we make every day on the job, we show a heart-felt concern for the needs and expectations of others.
• We tell the truth.
• We don’t cut corners, even if it puts us at a competitive disadvantage.

Treat everyone with respect and love.

• No one has to earn the right to be greeted warmly or to be listened to sincerely.
• We are each born with basic dignity – and we affirm that fundamental goodness in ourselves by honoring it in others.
• We value and recognize the contribution that each person makes to the success of our team.

Help our people reach their goals.

• No two people share the exact same goals. Therefore, we demonstrate our respect for each other by taking the time to learn each other’s goals and help them achieve them.
• We provide honest and constructive feedback on performance.
• We challenge and encourage each other.
• When we can, we take hurdles out of the way…while keeping in mind the need to treat everyone fairly and consistently.

Act as good stewards of our resources.

• We don’t view our time, our talents or our financial resources as belonging to us, but ultimately as tools for our Creator to use according to His will.
• Therefore, we will spend our money wisely, use our resources well, and capitalize on our collective talents in the best way possible.
• Our decisions, strategic or tactical, are considered through the lens of stewardship.
• We will work to take on no debt or as little debt as possible.
• We make a commitment to give 10% of our gross profit to organizations that better the world
• We dedicate 10% of our time to projects that serve a moral or humanitarian cause
• We cap our salaries regardless of growth.

We’re big believers in the power of photography to improve a site. Most designers think about aesthetics when choosing photos for pages. While we certainly love pretty photos as well, we also have learned over the years that the right photo can increase your conversion rates as well. A couple quick tips:

1. People are better than places or things - generally speaking photos of people are more effective than shots of objects or places. There are certainly exceptions (travel sites come to mind) but even then a photo of a beautiful landscape with people works better than a landscape without (and a person using a product works better than the product by itself.)
2. Women are better than men - interestingly, not only to men tend to convert at greater rates when women are in the photography, but women do as well. A simple trip to the bookstore magazine rack will confirm this for you. Pick up a copy of Maxim and a copy of Cosmopolitan. What gender is more prominent?
3. Photos where the subject is looking at the call to action boost conversion rates - when the subject is looking at the call to action the user’s eye is drawn towards the call to action. When the subject is looking back at the user, the user’s eye tends to stay where it is.

These days most search engine build their indexes by “crawling” sites. As we mentioned before, this is done primarily by following links from page to page, and from site to site.

As search engines follow links, they try to figure out the relevance of the sites they are indexing. Even though we’d all like to think of the ourselves as honest people, search engines have figured out that what we say our site is about might not be what it really is about. While your content still has a lot of value in determining your search engine position, Google and others have learned that a better way to figure out relevance is to see who’s linking to you.

Given this, it’s obvious that links weigh heavily in most search engine algorithms. As you develop your search engine optimization strategy, it is important to spend time focusing on the links that are on your site and the links other people have pointing to you. When possible, you want to adjust these links for maximum benefit. The following are some aspects of your links you’ll want to consider.

Anchor text of the link

Search engines pay very close attention to the actual words better use to when linking to another site. For example, consider the following links to Intentionally’s site:

• Intentionally
• Intentionally is a Web Design and Search Engine Optimization in Chicago
• Click here

Search engines would look at these three and consider the second the most valuable. It not only provides the name of the firm but describes the link as well, giving the search engine some context. The worst would be the third example, which shows no additional information at all.

When you have control of link text, make sure your text is relevant to the keywords you’re looking for.

Links going to other sites

Search engines don’t just consider links to you - they also will consider links you put on your site that go elsewhere. For example, if you were looking to position yourself for “chicago usability consulting” but your pages are mostly linking to sites that have nothing to do with usability your site could be treated as irrelevant for that term.

Text surrounding your links (i.e. the links in context)

As search engines have become more savvy, they’ve learned how to examine the content around the link. They operate under the assumption that paragraphs generally are describing an single idea or thought, and as such take the entire paragraph into consideration.

The location of links relative to the overall site heirarchy

We mentioned this previously, but links that are buried deep in your site carry less weight than links that are directly accessible from the homepage or secondary pages. Site maps can help in this regard, but make a conscious effort to have your most important content easily accessible from the homepage.

The amount of links on individual pages

A trick that was commonly used in the past was to create a site that was nothing but keyword stuffed links. Search engines picked up on this and started penalizing sites that employed this practice. Today, the general rule is that as the number of links on a particular page increase, the relative strength for each individual link go down. It’s smart to create focused pages about single topics and have the majority of your links be about those specific topics vs. lots of general links.

Prominence of a link in your site’s code

Generally speaking, links placed higher on the page have more weight than links down on the bottom. This is based on the premise that the most valuable content is usually “above the fold” and prominently placed, and also a defense against sites that hide a bunch of links on the bottom of their pages to influence search engine rankings.

Again, there are other issues to consider, but the above should be taken into consideration when crafting your content and overall site strategy.

One of the more common steps in a typical web or interface design work flow is to take the notes from a creative brief and create 2 or 3 (or more) different “looks” demonstrating different directions you can take.

Why multiple comps is a bad idea

We’ve found over the years that nearly all designers create one really strong design and then supplement it with straw men designs that exist solely for the purpose of looking busy. They know that they put most of their energy and thought into the first design, and they generally push for that design when presenting - the others exist largely to be rejected.

Problem is, what often ends up happening is that Design A gets combined with Design B, with a smattering of Design C thrown in. The design which once expressed a sense of cohesion and order, where everything was in the right place an felt “right” devolves into an amalgam, devoid of a strong sense of purpose.

It’s not that the features from the other designs aren’t cool ideas or aren’t pretty - they usually are. They’re just not right for that interface - if they were, they would have been there in the first place.

Create one strong design. Iterate.

The alternative, and the one we pursue, is to create one design and iterate over it with the client. Most of the time we’re tweaking elements. Sometimes we start from scratch. But every design has a clear intent behind it. Every design brings our strongest, sharpest thinking to bear on the problem. Besides, if we have X units of time to complete the first round of designs, we want all that time focused on solving the problem, not trying to think of how many different wrappers to put around it.

This approach has actually served us very well, even on larger projects. After doing hundreds of university designs (which are always committee based and political in nature) the one-design approach has consistently led to fewer revisions, happier clients and better results. On the rare occasion when a client insisted on doing multiple designs up front, the end result was confusion, longer turnaround times and a Frankenstein monster of a final product.

One of the most common pitfalls in search engine positioning is caused by the technology behind a site and the assumptions made by that technology.

As you probably know, search engines find content on your site primarily through a process of “crawling” - following links from page to page and indexing the content as it goes along. Given that, it makes sense that in order for search engines to find your content the pages must be directly linked to from other public facing pages.

You’d think that most content management systems or applications would do this, but that’s often not the case. Rather, many systems are designed without search engine optimization in mind and as a result the content is hidden or difficult to find. And sites that makes a search engine’s job harder often don’t get indexed.

The following is a rundown of the kinds of issues should you look for when diagnosing your site, evaluating a content management system or embarking on a web application development project. It is by no means exhaustive, but should help you identify and avoid many of the more common pitfalls.

• Don’t bury pages too deeply in the site. Generally speaking, if a page is more than three clicks from the homepage the likelihood of being indexed goes down dramatically.
• Don’t use frames. These are largely out of vogue by now anyway, but occasionally you’ll run into them. Frames load two different pages simultaneously and are a search engine (and usability) nightmare.
• Avoid urls with variables. Many content management systems will create urls based on a string of parameters - if you’ve ever seen a url like www.site.com/content?id=398k&comment=18 then you know what this looks like. Search engines are not fans of urls constructed in this manner, and modern systems make it easy to avoid it. The best alternative is to use “pretty urls” which read much more naturally for humans and search engines. Urls like www.site.com/content/my-new-page follow this convention.
• Every page should be reachable via a simple HTML link. This has numerous implications. If your navigation is flash only, if it’s dynamically loaded in some way, is hidden behind a login, or is only available via a search function on your site there’s a good chance it can’t be found by a search engine.
• Always create a sitemap. A sitemap is basically a page listing all the content available on your site. It is often accessible via a link in the footer of every page, and makes it easy for search engines (and your users) to reach every page on the site. This is recommended in all cases, but particularly if you a site with pages buried deeply.

Making these changes give you a top ranking by themselves, but they will at least prevent you from being disqualified before the race even starts. Again, this list is by no means complete. If you have any additional suggestions that we missed feel free to leave a note below!