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So you’ve been lucky enough to land a few visitors to your site. How do you get this merry band of fickle users to stick around and accomplish both their goals and your own?

You’ll have spent time and money on “web design” and maybe even specifically on “user experience design” and solid “information architecture,” but if you want people to buy, subscribe and enlist, you must be persuasive.

Here’s a great checklist to print out and abide by when trying to be persuasive online.

1. Provide a starting point.

• Your users need to start somewhere, or they’ll just click X.
• Whatever the landing page – make it easy for a user to jump right into your content or move on to something else.

2. Cover the basics

• Who are you? Your people, organisation.
• What do you do?
• Where do you do it?
• Why do you do what you do?

3. Explain who you are across the whole site

• A huge portion of your visitors won’t come to your site for the first time on the homepage.
• Use a universal header, footer or sidebar to have the same content across your site for reference.

4. Show us the proof – Back up your claims

• Portfolios
• Case studies
• Testimonials

5. Make Your Navigation Show How Great You Are

• Show off your value through clear labeling.
• Be original in how you label content – users will want to know more.
• These work for SEO too, remember.

6. Link to Related Content

• Use buzzwords as hyperlinks around your content.
• Make text within copy link to further reading.

7. Offer Site-Wide Search

• Search is synonymous with the experience of browsing the web.
• Don’t make users search the Google bar in their browser instead of in your site.
• Make it easy for users to browse more and more of your site.

8. Use a Great Headline on Every Page

• It’s the hook to get your visitors to read the rest of the page.
• It could be a call to action.
• It’s powerful search engine juice.

9. Keep the Copy Brief

• We read 25% more slowly online.
• We scan more than read (79% vs. 16%)
• As a rule of thumb, use half the amount of blurb as you would in print.
• Express one idea per paragraph
• Link succinct comments to more detailed copy

10. Be Consistent With Your Calls-To-Action

• As users navigate through your site, don’t upset their journey with inconsistencies.
• Repetition will work in your favour when they do choose to subscribe or buy.

11. Use Permission Marketing Everywhere

• This refers to opt-in requests to sign up for newsletters or more information.
• Place it prominently across the whole site – you will dramatically increase sign-up.

12. Make The Contact Page Usable

• Make sure all your contact details are here, clearly laid out.
• Make sure you use a HTML contact form
  • It’s the easiest way for you to be reached from your site
  • Some corporates will block email links
  • You can prompt users to select a category of enquiry for easy management

13. Provide an Effective Site Map

• Clearly show the categories of your content and how they are inter-related.
• Easy to submit to search engines & directories for maximum exposure.

14. Answer Your Users’ Questions in Advance with a FAQ Section

• Save on your customer service
• Make the process of conversion as smooth as possible

15. Be Honest

• Be upfront about your offering and its price.
• Make it easy for people to see what they’re getting.
• Provide useful notes where confusion may arise.

16. Keep it Personal

• Avoid bland, detached corporatespeak.
• Use a customer-centric style of writing.
• Be conversational – involve your users.

17. Overcome User Anxiety

• What might your users fear on your site?
• Is there too much on the screen during crucial payment stages?
• Keep the distractions down.
• Keep it simple.

18. Let Your Users Know It’s Safe to Use Your Site

• Especially if you’re asking for their financial details – they need to have peace of mind.
• Let visitors know that you do everything possible to ensure safety and privacy.

19. Don’t let site registration get in the way

• Putting up a registration wall around your content could drive away valuable traffic.
• Using this as a prerequisite to shopping online could lose you customers – leave it til check-out.

20. Good SEO everywhere.

• Leave no stone unturned.
• Metadata, page titles, headers, images, links and copy should all be optimised for search engine crawlers.

According to this list, the vastness and variety of the Goog’s operations since two Stanford students formed a private company 11 years ago is nothing short of jaw-droppingly impressive. Not content with being the most visited site on earth and dominating the online advertising market to the tune of tens of billions, the company has branched into hundreds of directions, offering free products and services to the hundreds of millions of people who visit every day, several times a day.

Some of it is rather impressive.  Some of it is not.  But the core product that Google offers is Search.  It is the moneymaker it shakes to such profitable effect that it has become a vast conglomerate of innovative, disruptive and extremely well-funded start-ups that are changing the way we do business and interact with each other.  We use Analytics for our sites, Alerts to keep abreast of goings-on in the industry, Maps to get to our meetings on time, YouTube to keep us entertained.  This post is being written in Google Docs, the time spent on it organised in Google Calendar.

But most of all, we use Google Search, and we can’t help but think that all these “innovations” are actually distracting from the core product when it is needed most.  Data and information are being produced at a rate far greater than that which we can consume and make sense of.  The once ethereally minimalist presentation of Google Search Results now yields a mess.  News items take more and more precedence at the top, once textual results now have thumbnail snapshots of each site, realtime search results appear in a box halfway down the page, image and video results are thrown into the mix, related searches at the bottom.  And this is just on the universally coveted Page 1 that most site owners set as their moonshot goal.

In the first week of December alone, the company has: redesigned its iconic homepage; integrated realtime content into its main search results and into its Finance pages; placed geo-Tweets into its Maps applications; launched a new version of Analytics and its API; updated how news publishers feature their content; unveiled its own Dictionary; outlined its own DNS standards; unveiled Goggles; and launched it’s Chrome browser for Mac.

It may be a tacit admission that Google itself does not know how to make sense of the exponentially-increasing information being produced.  It can no longer offer the Zen-like experience of finding content, just more options for splicing it up. Top Tens, Best in Show, Page 1 – we’ve always had an affinity with ranking systems, but it seems less and less like the ideal solution to the problem.  When analysing a spreadsheet with 200,000 rows of data, you don’t get an understanding of it from the first or largest 10 or 20 items.  You analyse the whole, build up graphical representations, find patterns across the set to inform. How best to analyse 39 million results for “Barack Obama”?

Perhaps their solution is to just tie us into as many other sticky products and services so we ignore the fact that its competitors are actually delivering better search results and better click-rates to advertisers these days.  The new operating systems for desktop and mobile, the new browsers, the integrated realtime search, may all appear to be game-changing innovations from the market leader, but really it seems more like an unfocused monopolistic land grab.  It swoops in on entire sectors, swallowing promising newbies whole by making offers shareholders can’t refuse.

Google may well succeed, but at what cost to innovation in search?

We’re honoured to have been shortlisted for this year’s Innovation Awards held by digital marketing experts, Econsultancy.

VI has been nominated for “Innovation in SEO/Natural Search,” alongside Latitude, Majestic-12 and Stickyeyes.  Our submission is for our pioneering work in Flash website design, where we have perfected market-beating solutions for making sites built in the software as indexable to search engines, as userfriendly, and as editable by content management systems as non-Flash sites.

The champers is still on ice though, as we’ve now got to go through the grueling judging by a formidable panel of industry experts:

• • Marko Balabanovic, Head of Innovation, lastminute.com
  • Adrian Blair, Head of Ecommerce Partnerships, Google
  • Noam Butcher, Marketing Manager, Unilever
  • Dr Dave Chaffey, Director, Marketing Insights
  • Jonny Freeman, Digital Marketing Manager, Honda
  • Avinash Kaushik, Blogger, Author, Speaker, Consultant
  • Sara Linfoot, Digital Innovation Manager, The Guardian
  • Ciaran Norris, Director, Invention, Mindshare
  • Tamer Ozmen, Head of Online, Orange
  • Sidarth Rao, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Webchutney
  • Gary Stein, VP, Isobar
  • Ian Tait, Partner, Poke
  • John Willshire, Head of Innovation, PHD Media

Three years ago, we went to see a demonstration of Magic Symbol, an application of augmented reality technology from Inition. Using specially designed codes on a 2D surface, cameras were able to motion track them and display 3D designs in realtime on a monitor nearby.

The technology has managed to persist in live exhibitions, appearing as an add-on to DVDs and magazines, and more excitingly, in the flourishing mobile phone application space.

However, despite years of serious development and now wider adoption by content providers and consumers alike, it has yet to emerge from the gimmicksphere. This week, Channel 4 reminds us of a similar technology that once had mass appeal and went away for decades for its lack of persistent usability.

For a brief period in the 1950s, 3D was a huge pull to the cinemas, helping to deflect mass exodus to the increasingly ubiquitous television set in every home. The channel has partnered with Sainsbury’s to distribute free 3D glasses to enjoy the retro kitsch experience of watching classics shot in the format.

Images will once again leap out of the screen, but only if seen through the cumbersome lenses of a pair of cardboard glasses that you have to source out of your own initiative down the shops. This, of course, was the seemingly minor hindrance that spelled the end of 3D for the next 60 years.

What the two technologies have in common is that they are both experiential, but risk being completely sidelined if they don’t prove an irresistible usefulness. As the Magic Symbol website unwittingly admits, the technology has far more “features” than useful applications. The onus to find uses for it is on us; the last point reads, “only limited by your imagination…”

There is far more promise and usefulness on the mobile front, with evermore widely adopted smartphones that have apps which makes use of their cameras to overlay relevant, geospecific data. Raise your device to the horizon and local restaurants, Tube stations and encyclopedic data appear to help you make better sense of your surroundings. Suddenly, the world around you, on the go, is enhanced by technological aid, helping to merge the physical and the digital.

However, walking down the street with your phone held up to the horizon is an awkward experience – much like wearing 3D glasses to enjoy the cinema or television. It’s good for the occasional bit of showing-off to your peers or the very limited occasions when it truly enhances an experience, but mostly, it is not fit for purpose.

Despite the explosion of powerful handheld devices, they still only possess about a tenth of the computing power of your average desktop, and many are falling through the gap between. Many developers seem to be biting off more than they can chew in terms of functionality, or putting all their effort into design at the expense of it.

It reminds us quite a bit of how Flash has long faltered in usability, and as a result in mass adoption.  It also reminds us of touch screens that had a failed debut; of scent transmission that never really took off; of immersive virtual reality that never truly captured the collective imagination.  People didn’t understand the limitations of these technologies and therefore lost out on the real opportunities that were afforded by them.

As a result, what we’re left with for now, is a gimmick. We must realise that there is a bigger war to be won, instead of obsessively focusing on the petty battles which threaten to derail true innovation. As long as the technology fails to prove its usefulness to the human experience, it will continue to resist the seamless integration many predict.  It must be usable, and a pleasure to use at that.

@wearevi

The web development industry as a whole has long looked down their nose at Flash. The name of the technology itself seemed to reveal how many felt about it; big in its visual impact, but lacking in the substance that made the Web 2.0 movement – with functionality and simple graphics at its core – so very attractive. Whilst Flash served as an incredible tool for creating stunning user interfaces online, it fell behind, lacking in the usability and utility that web users had long come to expect; zero loading times, back buttons that worked intra-site and frequently updated modular designs. As a result, it also suffered in the SEO game that the rise of search and Google engendered.

Despite this, the widespread adoption of broadband and the craze for online video through YouTube and a thousand clone sites allowed the plugin to reach near-universal adoption. Its developer community forged ahead, attacking each problem through further refinements; VI being the first to produce a Flash site as indexable by search engines and as familiarly user-friendly as any other non-Flash site.

With these issues largely out of the way and over 99% of internet-connected desktops having the plugin, Flash has a huge part to play in the future of web development and content-rich sites and applications. As IE6 holds back innovation and HTML5 waits in the shadows, it is Flash – now packing some SEO punch – that has the strong hand.

And what of the fast-growing mobile space? The latest version, 10.1, was recently announced for nearly every mobile device platform (Windows Mobile, webOS, Android, Symbian, Blackberry), with huge innovations that allow it to function with less processor and power consumption – increasing rendering speeds by 87% on mobile vs desktop and reducing memory consumption by 55%. But what of the one notable exception – the iPhone?

Despite being the smart phone that set the bar for mobiles as on-the-go internet-enabled devices, Apple has been vocal in not allowing the Flash plugin onto its closed system, even the new mobile-enhanced version. But in doing so, they have actually pushed Adobe to be even more innovative and actually cater for the iPhone in a meaningful – and monetisable – manner.

Unlike the other mobile platforms that have now accepted the plugin within their browsers, the upcoming Flash CS5 will allow developers to create standalone, native iPhone applications using Flash and ActionScript3. Although the door was closed to the plugin, it’s had the effect of making Flash a powerful development platform for the applications that make the iPhone what it is. Not only will Flash enjoy continued ubiquity of adoption across multiple platforms as a plugin, it will soon be able to offer developers direct monetisation through the App store when they export an application rather than a SWF.

And if the continued ubiquity of Flash as a platform and now application-builder was not enough, the technical limitations placed on its mobile implementations will quite probably benefit the technology as a whole. By catering for mobile and mobile applications, the “full” version can learn a few tricks itself in becoming a more lean technology that puts user engagement at its core.