Summer’s a light season…even on the web
Now is a good time to take a quick look at your website, its content, and its user journey and experience. You don’t want to spend hours in front your computer during the warm summer months, and neither do your users! Keep your website and advertising campaigns light and avoid cumbersome colours, designs, and complexity.
If you’re creating new pages and campaigns for the summer, keep the colours open and minimal. For signups or purchases on your site, try to implement 1 or 2 step processes where possible. Remember that those “already short attention spans” of potential internet customers become even shorter once the sun is shining and the park or beach is calling. Don’t compete with the weather when it comes to computers; it’s one battle you’ll be hard pressed to win.
“Show me what you mean, please”
What do we mean by summer fresh designs and colours? Well here are a couple of examples. We’re not saying to redesign your entire site for 3 months of year, but perhaps you can get general design inspiration off of these interfaces:
Sample 1
Sample 2
Other samples
Here are a couple more interfaces we like that demonstrate what we’re trying to say: simple, light, clean, fresh. Just like a refreshing summer salad.
http://organic.cssmixer.com
http://www.virtism.com
Campaigns are important. Time them properly.
If possible, try to postpone the larger internet marketing campaigns for September or October when the weather gets worse and people are back into their work mode. This might mean having to prepare for these larger campaigns as early as August to launch them in September or October.
Knowning if your site has gone stale and needs a refreshing update is difficult to determine. Our latest article on OptoMedia Webtalk can help you with this: http://optomedia.ca/how-do-you-know-when-your-website-is-outdated
Please oh please, elliminate the noise
Our light summer spirit is also a good reminder to stop trying to learn any and every web application out there. There are simply too many and no end to all the learning curves.
2 social media services are more than enough; you don’t need to know 8 of them. 1 email campaign service will handle your email campaigns just fine. WordPress is a good platform to get to know for managing your site; it will perform most of what you need.
Check your email and Facebook newsfeed only 2 twice a day. Turn off the computer and mobile device in the evening and on the weekends if you can. We really mean turn it off. Perhaps go do an outdoor activity instead.
Here’s a very simple formula for enjoying life that we sometimes forget :)
internet = great for work, not good for social life
Cut the noise, and you’ll see that your quality of life will instantly improve.
