Emerging trends in web accessibility - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

Every now and then it’s pretty cool to sit back and retrospectively look at the evolution of the web, in both a usability and design sense, and get a feel for where it’s heading.
We’ve been coming across an exciting range of unique web designs recently, and through our natural fascinations with such subjects, we’ve been carefully considering how we can isolate future ready design trends and apply them to our existing catalogue of clients.

To us, it’s pretty common knowledge that users are beginning to expect more out of the web than just your standard run of the mill static looking website. A high level of user interactivity is in demand, and when businesses fail to invest in the latest technology, they struggle to have any major impact on their target audience.

The Internet is still relatively young, and while black and white information architecture and usability methodologies are in integral part of website design, they’re simply building blocks now in a much, much more complicated profession. To illustrate my point, consider the two most important trends in web design for 2012:

• Responsive (adaptive) design – We now live in an age where mobile phones play as just an important role in website browsing as personal computing, particularly in the past few years as smart phones have become more accessible to the common population. For businesses, this now means that customers expect their information to be accessible anywhere, on any device. In the first few years, catering for the mobile device market proved to be both hacky and vague, with no real standardized solution to cater to both handheld and desktop technologies. Now, as web developers we’re able to cater to both userbases – we’ve just had to slightly alter the way we go about doing it.

  Responsive web design utilises percentage values and scalability to target specific devices through CSS media queries. The end result of which means that you can have a website that looks just as good on mobile as it does on the web and ensures that it is future ready – hence the ‘adaptive’ element. Responsive websites are harder to build, and require a lot more attention to detail in the planning phase, but if successfully achieved, the results are simply outstanding.

  Cool examples you can play around with include the smashing magazine website. Simply shrink your browser and see how the content adapts to sit comfortably, and clearly, in the smaller sizes.
  This technology is something we’ll be featuring in the latest website we’re working on, Ten Very Special Things, and it will definitely be something we’ll include in future projects.

• Design using HTML5 canvas – While significantly more complicated than responsive design, it is still becoming increasingly more common in 2012. HTML5 canvas designs place a stronger emphasis on website interactivity, rather than accessibility. Designers now use HTML5’s high levels of interactivity to target user emotion and enhance the browsing experience. A prime example is the Tourism New Zealand website. Scroll down with your mouse, and be amazed.

It does raise a question, though. How can we harmonize accessibility and interactivity? The truth is, we can’t. What we can do however is recognise the context of when each technology should be used.

Keep an eye on the Ziller site in the future. If you think that our current design is old and outdated, you’re right! We think the same thing, so we’re working on a complete rebrand and website overhaul. Expect to see some cool things in this space in the not so near future

As an eCommerce web development company, we produce a lot of large scale websites for bigger clients seeking a profitable and manageable long term solution. Occasionally, we also work with a number of smaller businesses who are looking to get the most out of their online experience. This work generally entails a lot of paid-per-click marketing and landing optimisation.
If you’re not familiar with landing page optimisation, it can be summarised as a the construction of a sales driven web page that utilises a number of research-backed techniques designed to engage and entice the user into a goal or a sale.
If you’re new to the practice, you might be wondering just what best practices and techniques should be deployed in a well-performing landing page. To give you a bit more insight, we thought we’d shed some light on a recent project we completed for one of our clients, Call a Cooler:

1. Domain name selection– Of course, prior to commencing this project, our AdWords experts conducted tonnes of keyword research into what Call a Cooler’s target audience was searching for as well as into the volumes of traffic behind each keyword.From a combination of isolating the keywords of the highest value, as well as the level of competition for each keyword, we matched domain availability against the keyword of highest value. If you can secure a highly relevant keyword-based domain, immediately, your landing page will perform well in organic search results straight off the bat due to the relevancy of the URL to the target search term.
2. Prominence of value propositions– This one is very straight forward, but you’d be surprised at how lost in translation a value proposition can get within the clutter of a landing page design. Think about it, all you have to work with is a single web page; there’s never going to be enough room to fit all of your content, so what do you include, and how do you prioritise it?Ideally, you will want your main value propositions to sit above the fold of your landing page (600px), have a strong, captivating message and also provide the potential customer with the immediate acknowledgment of their needs/wants.

   When it comes to landing page optimization, copy writing is just as imperative as the surrounding design. Without good copy, you might just have a nice looking page with abysmal substance. This isn’t going to convert well, is it?

   The Call a Cooler page does an outstanding job in addressing the immediate needs of the user above the fold, as soon as the page is loaded, with a clear, prominent value proposition.

3. Ease of access to convert – Once you’ve got the value proposition nailed, you need to make sure that it is virtually effortless for the potential customer to commit to the sale or goal. The positioning of forms is critical. Make sure your call to action buttons are clear and bold, and that your form fields are unobtrusive. If you’re accustomed to prettying up your input fields with custom javascript – a landing page isn’t the right place for it. The last thing you want is a hidden form field.
4. Clear points of contact – Make sure that all points of contact are lucid and easy to identify. If the objective of your landing page is to get the user to call you, then make sure that your phone number is strategically placed within the natural vector paths of the user’s eye. Reinforce every value proposition with a contact form or phone number within eye range. This will help eliminate any seeds of doubt that the user may have about contacting you as well as enforce the fact that your company is approachable and genuinely wants to help, which leads me to my next point…
5. Personalisation of brand – People identify with people. It’s a proven fact that customers feel much more comfortable in making first contact with someone they’ve already seen/heard of because they can emotionally identify with them. Check out the Call a Cooler page for example, within 2 seconds of landing on the page it’s already made clear that Sean is the main point of contact, and genuinely wants to help.

Landing page optimisation may seem pretty straight forward on paper, but when you put it into practice; you’ll find it to be a lot more challenging when faced with the limitations of space!
I hope that you’ve taken value from some of these tips. If you want to see a good landing page in action, be sure to visit the Call a Cooler landing page!

We’re proud to say that yesterday our company donated $2000 to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to aid the conservation of gorillas in the wild. If you’re not already aware, gorillas are now endangered in the wild, and are under constant threat from poaching and habitat destruction.

If you would like to learn more about the cause, please check out our information page here.

We hope you guys had an amazing Christmas and New Year. Things are getting busy again here at the Ziller office – and to be honest, we haven’t stopped! We’ve got some massive projects lined up for 2012, and with our business getting larger, our ideas are as well. I’d just like to give you a heads up on a new project we’re working on in partnership with a company called The Trees and The Forests, a reputable digital marketing agency in Sydney. The project is called Ten Very Special Things, and we’re proud to say that we’ve both designed and built the website.

Ten Very Special Things is a not for profit charity eCommerce website, where users can register to sell a unique or interesting item via the store, designate a charity, and allocate a percentage of sales towards that charity. We’re pretty sure that this hasn’t been done before, and we feel that the website is going to be a huge hit throughout the online community.

Check it out for yourself. The site isn’t live just yet, but you can keep tabs on the web page here.

Bring on 2012!

Thought we would put up a real quick post to let you in on a website we are currently working on. Keep your eye on Ollio in the coming months and be sure to register your email to get early updates and access during beta testing.

We’d just like to give a quick shout out to the Christmas World clan for their fine Christmas decorations! Deck the halls with bells and holly, Trent’s feeling kind of festive, and so are our resident monkeys! If you ever need to buy some cheap, quality Christmas gear, then we definitely recommend that you check out Christmas World!

On October 10 this year, the Ape Conservation Effort held the first annual Gorilla Golf Tournament at the Brookfield Country Club in Roswell, Georgia. Ziller were proud to sponsor a hole and help raise money for gorilla conservation.

The Ape Conservation Effort are a Georgia based not-for-profit organisation, which is comprised of a number of volunteer members who like Ziller, share a passion for animals and a commitment to saving the great apes of the world (bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans).

In addition to supporting the Gorilla Golf Tournament, Ziller are also a proud partner of The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Please check out their website to read more about their cause and plight for gorilla conservation.

The team here at Ziller is extremely excited, and proud, to announce that one of our recent projects has been nominated for 2 categories in the Online Retail Industry Awards. In light of this great news, we thought we’d shed some light on the client’s background and reflect upon both the challenges and achievements of the project.

Joe Button is a specialist online retailer of custom-made business and dress shirts. The company is founded by three entrepreneurial individuals who have shared the same passion, and frustrations, for business shirts. When the team at Joe Button approached Ziller, their needs were clear; they wanted to create a unique online shopping experience that allowed customers to build the perfect business shirt that would compliment their build with a flawless fit.

Due to the highly dynamic nature of the website, we were challenged to push our talents to the maximum to develop a capable, unique solution that met the needs of the Joe Button team. When we were briefed, a primary feature of the website was clearly the user’s ability to freely build and customise a business shirt to their liking, utilising different fabrics, colours, sizes and styles.

By all means, the challenge faced by our team was monumental. But for us here at Ziller, we simply just can’t say no to a challenge!

Conceptually, the client wanted a simple, elegant feel to the website to reflect the conservative, classy nature of business and dress clothing. Utlising the client’s brand guidelines, we managed to produce a design concept and information structure that is both visually pleasing and easy to use:

The second part of the project, was engineering what’s under the hood. The Joe Button website was another one of our websites to roll-out using our custom built and very own ‘Zorilla’ CMS. If you’ve had a look around the website, you’ll notice that one of the stand-out features is undoubtedly the 3D rendering of the dress shirts when you ‘customise your own shirt’. This was one of the most challenging features of the website to implement. Over 15,000 photographs of shirt sections were taken, and then developed and rendered onto 3D models. Once we got the modeling done, we then had to create algorithms to calculate every possible shirt combination the would appear to the end user. If you have a second to spare, try the feature out for yourself.

Pretty cool, right? Aside from the obvious fact that they also stock a shirt named the ‘Patrick Bateman’. Total 90’s glory, right there.

Anyway, we’d like to wish the team at Joe Button the best of luck in their nominations for ‘best new online retailer’, and ‘most innovative online retailer’. We’ll be cheering them on.

Trent hanging with Roger, the mascot of SEOMoz in Mozcon, Seattle!

We are just soooo excited to announce the launch of two of our latest websites in Joe Button and Antimall. Please check them out, we would love to know what you think!