The average person may think that all landing pages do is capture email addresses, but that’s not the case. Landing pages may also be used to facilitate downloads, persuade visitors to subscribe to newsletters, show videos, pitch sales, upsell existing customers, or offer other navigational options.

Technically, any web page that’s being used as the go-to destination for advertising and SEO can be classified as a landing page. This is particularly true in multi-channel marketing where different promotional avenues may require different configurations and styles of landing pages that are best fitted to receive the kind of traffic that each channel pushes.

Optimizing a Landing Page

Advertising and SEO aren’t enough to turn visits into qualified leads. Most of the time, marketers have to do varying levels of optimization to make sure the pages get good visibility while serving up good user experiences that encourage conversions. Here are nine steps to optimize a landing page for various promotional channels:

1. Determine the Landing Page’s Purpose

The first step in creating a functional landing page is deciding what it’s for. Are you using it to generate leads? Perhaps to pitch a sale? Whatever it is, the purpose has to be solitary and focused. Trying to get a visitor to do more than one thing usually leads to confusion and failure.

The landing page’s purpose sets the tone for everything from its headline to the body text and right down to its call to action. Keep in mind that Internet browsing attention span is short and volatile. If you bore or confuse your audience, your conversion rate suffers. Keep the messaging simple and united at all times.

2. Identify and Set the Value Proposition

In marketing, it’s never about you and what you want. It’s always about what’s in it for the target audience and how you can leverage that to get what you want in the process. That principle applies strongly to landing pages. It’s never about you, your mailing list or your sales figures. It’s always about the perceived value that your audience will get from absorbing your content and heeding your call to action.

When writing the copy, make the promise explicit every step of the way. Tell the reader how your offering either increases their pleasures or takes away their pains. Write about that in the opening paragraph and make it lead nicely to the benefit statement. Underscore your offers other benefits by enumerating them in short but impactful bullet points. Lastly, make it clear that your audience can only help you fulfill your promise by taking on your call to action.

3. Create at Least Two of Each Element

Landing page design and copywriting aren’t the most exact of sciences. You may have every reason to think that one headline or color scheme is better than another, but the majority of your audience could think otherwise. For that reason, testing is an essential part of landing page optimization. It provides empirical data straight from the field that helps you assess which parts of your landing page are working and which ones need to be improved.

Practically anything in a landing page can be tested. Headlines, buttons, calls-to-action and color palettes can be exposed to a sample set of the audience to gauge visitor responses. Tools such as Google Analytics can streamline the process and help you crunch the numbers for accurate result analysis.

There are two main types of testing used in landing page optimization: A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the type that switches out singular landing page elements to see which one performs better. Multivariate tests, on the other hand, are experiments that measure which combination of elements performs best.

4. Determine Where the Page Fold is

In newspaper parlance, the fold is the not-so-imaginary line separating the top half from the bottom half of a broadsheet. The most important headlines, images, and news stories are placed above the fold while everything else is positioned below it.

We may be in a day and age where news publications have gone online and folds no longer exist as we knew them, but they go on in a different form. As far as web pages go, “above the fold” pertains to the area that’s immediately visible when the page fully loads. This area is prime online real estate and it will determine whether or not the majority of your audience will stay and scroll down.

Having said that, it’s crucial for a landing page to position vital elements such as the headline and important images above the fold. The promise of value has to be sensed by the audience within a few seconds and without scrolling down.

Granted, users will vary in devices and screen resolution preferences which means the fold may vary from person to person. However, you can compensate for that by planning for what the majority will use. For desktop devices, it’s a safe bet to assume that the average screen resolution will be 1600×900 or close variants of that.

Smartphones and tablets may have totally different display specifications and you’ll want to cater for them with either mobile-friendly counterparts of your landing pages or well-planned responsive webpages that scale down accurately to the devices viewing them.

5. Apply Basic SEO

Search engine traffic is still the best driver of qualified visitors to a landing page. Make sure to use keywords in important elements such as title tags, header tags, image alternate text and body copy. Make sure you use canonical URLs and if you can direct some internal and external links to the landing page, by all means do so.

Even when you’re not relying on organic search traffic to feed visitors to your landing page, you should still apply these optimizations. Title tags and meta descriptions display prominently when your landing page URL is shared on social media. PPC bots also crawl landing pages and award relevance points when these important SEO elements are filled in accurately. Basic SEO doesn’t require a lot of effort but it will reward your landing page in more ways than one.

6. Make Sure It’s Mobile-Friendly

By the end of 2014, it was reported that mobile Internet use has officially surpassed desktop usage. This is a huge development and the trend seems to only be getting started.

The mobile web is a big, open market and early adopters are bound to be rewarded. If you want to tap the latest evolution of the Internet as we know it, it’s in your best interest to make your landing pages mobile-friendly.

7. Remove Unnecessary Links

Think of links within your landing page as exit routes. The more of them you have, the greater the chances that visitors will wander off somewhere and never come back. To maximize your conversion rate, it’s usually best to have only one clickable item: the call-to-action button. This helps you funnel your traffic more easily towards the kind of user action that results in the fulfilment of your conversion goals.

Links aren’t bad per se, but make sure you absolutely have to have them before you place them on the landing page. Examples of these links are the ones leading to your privacy policy and terms of use. Just make sure they’re set up to open in new tabs or windows so you don’t end up pulling visitors away from the landing page itself.

8. Add Social Proof

Social proof is the psychological phenomenon where people assume that the actions and thoughts of others is the correct one. More often than not, adding elements of social proof to a landing page helps increase conversion rates by reducing the audience’s perception of risk.

By that token, badges, testimonials and statistics help you build a better case for your call to action. Social proof widgets are usually placed either on the sidebars or the bottom part of the landing page. They’re completely optional but they’re great to have whenever you can get hold of them.

9. Track it All with Analytics

No matter how good your landing page does when you launch it, there’s always room for you to improve it en route to better conversion rates. Track it with Google Analytics or other web analytics platforms and monitor key metrics such as bounce rates, average times on the page and conversion rates.

This will help you measure user engagement and understand visitor behavior. It will also shed insights on whether or not you need to make adjustments in order to get the most out of the page and the promotions you’re doing.

Finished

Using landing pages for multichannel marketing isn’t the most exact of sciences and it needs constant testing with corresponding adjustments to yield the best results. Keep refining your craft and better traction won’t be far behind.

The post How to Optimize Landing Pages for Multichannel Marketing appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

For web design to be considered truly effective, analytics data has to tell a story that supports the claim. The Internet is one of those rare spaces where artistic touches can be measured with hard numbers. Design elements can be tested, quantified, and improved to truly capture the collective taste of a user base.

If you ever wondered why Apple and Google are leading the way in terms of design, it’s not just because they can hire the most talented people. A big part of their success is their tenacity in testing every design variable they use. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a mega-corporation to do what both these iconic enterprises do. With simple tools, no budget, and a little effort, you can start refining your site’s look en route to better usability and conversion rates.

Measuring the Elements of Web Design

Effective design should adhere to the core principles of what makes a site good. There are four elements that need to be considered at all times when putting a site together: These are:

1. A Clear Objective

Every site needs to send a strong but implicit message to the users about what it wants to accomplish. Whether it’s a sales pitch, an opt-in offer, an invitation to consume content, or to participate in a discussion, each page has to reflect a motive that’s beneficial to both the visitor and the webmaster.

Site design should serve as a guiding force for site objectives – it should help move the audience in farther along a conversion funnel.

Metrics to Consider:

The following metrics can help you determine whether or not your site manifests a clear objective or if it’s driving away users with vague motives:

• Bounce Rate – In traditional marketing, they say that a confused mind always says no. Applying that to web design and usability, a confused visitor will always hit the “back” button on their browser. According to analytics guru Avinash Kaushik, the bounce rate is the sexiest metric in all of digital marketing. It’s simple yet it tells you so much in just one glance.

A bounce happens when a user lands on one of your pages and goes back to the referring page without clicking on anything. It suggests that the user’s intent was likely not satisfied and the user experience was largely unfulfilling. If your site has a bounce rate of 60% or higher, that may be a cause for concern. It’s an indication that your design, your messaging or both could be confusing.

The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that bounced off a site’s pages versus the total number of visits. Practically every analytics platform offers bounce rate data for an entire site and on a per-page basis. In Google Analytics, your bounce rate is one of the first things you’ll see in the dashboard.

• Conversion Rate – A conversion happens when a site goal is accomplished. This could be a visit to a page, a transaction, an opt-in to a mailing list, a phone call, etc. Your conversion rate, therefore, is the percentage of visits that went on to convert versus the total number of site visits.

Unclear objectives can make a site’s conversion rate suffer. Being clear in your messaging and having a design scheme that limits distractions can help keep your conversion rate healthy. If your site’s conversion rate is below 2%, you’ll want to review your design and see if it helps or hurts the clarity of your site’s objectives.

2. Compelling Content

Content is central to every user’s experience in a site. Whether it’s text, video, audio or images, it has to be properly laid out and formatted to attract the most engagement from your audience. When properly supported by good site design, content becomes easier to access and share. Conversely, bad design can limit content’s ability to influence users and extend your site’s reach.

Metrics to Consider:

Most analytics platforms will give you an abundance of data that will give you ideas on how well your content is performing. Page-level bounce rates, as described under the previous section, are valuable in narrowing down pages that may be suffering from design issues. Here are other metrics to look at when trying to find clues about content performance with respect to design:

• Average Time on Page – The duration of your users’ stay on your pages is an indication of their engagement level. Non-engaged traffic leaves your pages in a hurry and bad design can contribute to their eagerness to leave. If the average user spends less than two minutes on average when they visit your pages, you’ll want to investigate the matter immediately.

Average times on site/page stats are served up in Google Analytics and most other platforms. In fact, you can find this metric right on GA’s basic dashboard. For page-level time averages, you can go to GA’s “Site Content” section and generate reports for all your pages to see which ones are underperforming. From there, you might be able to spot commonalities and patterns which can help you identify design issues.

• Exit Rate – Which pages in your site are sending away the most visitors when they’re not supposed to be the final stop in a conversion funnel? This metric will let you know. Under Google Analytics’ “Site Content” report, you can sort site pages according to which ones lead users out of your site the most. Pages with abnormally high exit rates should be investigated for possible design improvements that can halt the visitor bleed.

3. Ease of Navigation

Ease of navigation pertains to how quickly a user can browse through a site to find what he or she wants to see. The strategic use of menus, search boxes, and categories will help facilitate better navigational experiences. Ideally, a user shouldn’t take more than four clicks to go from the home page to the subpage that addresses their intent. Anything beyond that usually means your navigational design is confusing or ambiguous.

Jeff Sauro of MeasuringU wrote an excellent post on what you should look out for when trying to gauge a navigation scheme’s performance. These include:

• Findability Rate/Completion Rate
• Time to Find
• Variability in Finding Time
• Initial Click
• Success Path
• Confidence
• Difficulty:
• The Most Difficult Items to Locate
• First Path Success vs. Second Path Success
• Reasons for Difficulty

You can read the definition of each in the post linked above as well as hints on how to gather the data for them.

If you’re looking for navigation analytics reports that are easier to come by but not quite as in-depth, you’ll want to check out Google Analytics’ Navigation Summary. This hidden gem can be found under Behavior>Site Content>All Pages in GA. It shows how visitors flow from one page to another so you can gain insights on which pages are promoting good navigation and which ones are acting as traffic stoppers.

The goal is ultimately to make sure that your design is facilitating visitor movement and discovery of pages that satisfy user intent. The faster and easier the navigation paths make things for your audience, the better your big conversion numbers get.

4. Visual Appeal

Visual appeal refers to how a site holistically makes an impact to the visitor. Most people agree that visual appeal is a function of a site’s layout, color scheme, textures, fonts, and use of rich media. It’s also the part that’s the most subjective out of the four principles that make up a quality site. This means it’s the area where the most testing and analysis should be done to see which scheme pleases the majority of an audience.

For the most part, there are two types of testing done to see which visual elements work best for a site’s overall design. These are:

• A/B Split Testing – in web design and marketing, A/B testing is an experiment conducted to see which of two variants gets a better response from a small section of an audience. For instance, if you’re choosing between two calls-to-action button colors, you’ll want to perform this kind of test to see which one gets more clicked.

The same could apply to elements like fonts. If you want to know which one of two fonts promotes better reading, you can run a split test to see which setup yields better engagement signals. Average times on pages and scrolldown rates are some of the stats you’ll want to check.

Google Website Optimizer is an excellent tool for A/B testing. It’s free to use and is relatively friendly even to newbie webmasters.

• Multivariate Testing – If A/B testing tells you which one among singular elements works better, multivariate testing tells you which combination of elements promotes ideal user behavior. Does that button color go well with your background and the font style? Let user behavior give you the most honest answers.

Like A/B testing, Google Website Optimizer is a great tool for this type of test. VWO and Optimizely are also great options.

Tools to Help Improve Web Design and Performance

Planning and executing modifications to your website can be a daunting task, but this shouldn’t mean that you have to start from scratch. Listed below are tools that may help you get started.

Goal Setting and Tracking

Setting goals are an integral part in making enhancements in web design, as well as tracking them to see how you are faring. Google Analytics provides a comprehensive setup in creating goals for the changes you wish to apply. With GA, you can create custom goals, set values, record your status, and share them. You can also use Goals on Track, an alternative analytics platform for goal setting and monitoring.

Site and Page Speed

The changes you will implement in your site and webpages are likely to affect the loading speed. You can supervise these two activities using Pingdom, a tool that tells you how fast your site loads, and PageSpeed, a tool Google created that helps analyze how quickly your optimized webpages turn up.

Heat Map

Heat maps on your site allow you to determine the activities visitors do, such as clicks and scrolls, when they are on your site. It tells you which places they go to most and which areas are getting the least attention. Identifying your site’s heat map will clue you in to the aspects of your web design people consume the most. The tools that will help you monitor this are Crazy Egg and Inspectlet.

Coding Cheat Sheet

Coding is probably one of the most tedious tasks when it comes to implementing web design changes. Fortunately, ample guides are available to coders such as jQuery, CSS, HTML5, and Javascript to aid them.

Concluding

Ultimately, web design is a matter of continuous evolution. It’s good to go with artistry and best practices in the initial phases, but analytics and testing have to fuel the optimization process. Having a feel for what looks good and what works is nice; knowing for sure with numbers that don’t lie is even better.

The post How to Interpret Data to Improve Your Website Design and Performance appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

But paying attention to each and every one of your customers becomes more challenging the larger your clientele becomes. To ensure that nobody gets left out, you can turn to chatbots and email marketing, analyzing which works best for your business.

Chatbots: A Program You Can Talk To

A chatbot is a computer program that is capable of conversing with and responding to human users. The technology is relatively young, so its full potential is still being explored. Basic chatbots can provide preset responses to certain questions, often through an if-then approach, but advanced versions can provide more customized answers and solutions.

Suppose you want to buy something online. Traditionally, you’d have to browse through multiple product pages to find the item you need. With a chatbot, you can ask a question about your desired item and the program will take you directly to relevant product pages. It’s like having your very own shopping assistant.

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There are many advantages to using chatbots, not only for your business, but also for your customers. Here are some of them:

Better customer service – At the end of the day, chatbots are all about improving user experience. A survey says that more than 80 percent of customers expect assistance during shopping – and they need it within five minutes. Chatbots are designed to provide fast, real-time assistance by offering content and links that your customers may access to find and purchase the products they need.

Higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) – NPS indicates the likelihood that your customers will promote your brand to their peers. One of its most important determiners is customer satisfaction. Many customers are delighted by a business’ quick response, even if their issue isn’t completely resolved. Prompt assistance makes them feel valued, so they become more likely to speak positively to their family and friends about your brand.

Easy and cheap maintenance – Chatbots are easy to configure according to your business’ unique needs. Maintaining them doesn’t require much effort and resources either. For instance, they don’t cost as much as paying one of your staff members to be available 24/7 to entertain and engage your customers.

Accurate consumer data monitoring – Chatbots do more than respond to your customers. They also collect feedback and other insights that you can use to improve your product or service. The data collected by chatbots can also help you monitor your customers’ needs, gauge interest in products and services or specific features, and boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

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Time savings – You can use bots to send messages to all your clients at the same time. Even as a growing business, you probably have way more customers than you can send messages to manually within a day. A chatbot simplifies the process, saves you a lot of time, and ensures that messages are delivered when needed.

Compatibility with messenger apps – Nobody wants to download and install apps they’ll probably use once and won’t use again. This is why people usually stick to certain apps that get the job done. For instance, most people prefer to use popular messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Viber instead of downloading new ones every so often.

Chatbots are highly compatible with most messenger apps, allowing you to send messages through the media your customers actually use. In fact, chatbots are compatible with most social networks, too, which means you can also use them to improve the effectiveness of your social media strategy.

Increased in-app purchases – If you offer products that your customers can purchase through messaging apps, you can use chatbots to encourage higher sales. Analyze your customers’ buying behavior and program your chatbots to take advantage of any trend or opportunity to sell.

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Email Marketing: It Still Works

Despite being around for decades, email remains to be a crucial communication channel, and the data proves it. For instance, people sent 1.8 million more emails in 2017 than they did in 2016. And in 2018, 281 billion emails were sent and received daily around the world.

The continued relevance of email marketing rests on its many advantages, which include the following:

Targeted messages thru segmented lists – It’s great to be able to reach out to a lot of people, but it’s even better if your messages reach those who actually need and are likely to respond to them. Email marketers can segment their lists to ensure that only those who meet certain criteria receive a particular message.

With a large number of emails an average person receives in a day, making sure your content is relevant to them is an excellent way to getting noticed in your customer inbox. This tactic is known to increase engagements, making it effective for purposes ranging from spreading awareness about your brand to being an effective tool to grow your ecommerce business with email marketing.

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Revenue growth– With the right subject line, dynamic content, and call-to-action, it’s possible to influence email readers to purchase your product. When paired with the right targeting strategy, email marketing can be one of the best tools to generate sales from impulse purchases.

Multi-device compatibility – People read their emails on multiple devices, which means you can reach your customers no matter what device they may use. Make sure you optimize your emails for all screens for the best results.

Message testing – Your email is only as good as its content, but it can be hard to create the perfect email on your first try. The good thing about email marketing is that you can send out several versions of the same email to test which ones are the most effective. The feedback you gain may be incorporated to your content marketing strategy to improve your outcomes moving forward.

Lead generation – Many of those who receive your emails won’t make a purchase, but that doesn’t mean your efforts are wasted. By using your succeeding emails to check on them or update them about your products, you can foster a relationship with these leads and eventually convert them into paying customers.

Relationship maintenance – Just because a purchase has been made doesn’t mean you relationship with your customer has ended. Using email, you can keep the relationship going. With the right push, you may turn a one-time buyer into a loyal customer who will stick to your brand long-term.

Email or Chatbots?

Now on to the big question: does your business need chatbots or email marketing more? Without a doubt, both email and chatbots have their strengths and weaknesses, requiring an analysis of which could help your business more.

Chatbots offers quick and highly personalized service to users. It is also entirely driven by consent – your customers absolutely won’t have to use it unless they choose to. Because of this, chatbots tend to generate higher click-through rates and conversion rates. To compare, emails have a CTR of only 4% on average, while chatbots generate up to a whopping 16%.

Chatbots are also not known to send spam messages, which tend to fill up email inboxes and annoy users. Because of this, customers are more likely to read messages you send them via messenger apps.

However, emails are a lot cheaper than chatbots. If you were to look at the two services in the market, you’d see that both of them actually have almost similar price points. The difference is that email, having been around longer, offers more choices in terms of providers. Some email services charge nothing up to a certain number of messages sent, meaning you can send out marketing assets without spending a single cent.

Messenger apps may be popular, but not everyone uses them. People older than 55 tend to use emails more than they do messenger apps. That said, chatbots are generally better for businesses with younger customers, but email marketing is able to reach out to customers of any age.

Chatbots are a developing technology and it is exciting how they will improve in the future. Email, on the other hand, seems like it isn’t going anywhere soon. Find out what each option’s strengths and limitations are and choose which one offers the most benefits to your business. Better yet, why don’t you use both?

The post Chatbots vs Email Marketing: Which Is the Best for Your Business? appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Below are tips on how to grow your social following with email marketing – all of which could help not only expand your reach, but improve conversion rates as well.

Why the usual approach doesn’t cut it

As alluded to earlier, looking to grow your following solely within the platform you’re in isn’t the optimal way of going about it. You can promote your page, boost posts, or even implement sketchy tactics like mass following and buying followers, but it still won’t be as effective as using your other channels to promote your social channels.

Email marketing not only has the highest ROI of all digital channels, it’s also excellent at spreading the word about your social channels. This is simply because the people on your list already know you and have an ongoing relationship with you.

So if you already have a robust email list, here’s how you can translate that to more social media followers:

Improve your list building strategy

Of course, before you can leverage email to grow your social reach, you’ll need to have a healthy email list. And you don’t want just any list, you want a robust list of people who will actually engage with you. One way to do this is by having easy-to-fill subscription forms on web pages you identify as frequently visited by potential subscribers.

Make sure you keep your forms short and simple, asking only for the most basic information. If there are two things people don’t like – it’s filling up long forms, and giving up too much information.

Include social media links in your emails

One of the most straightforward ways to go about it is to simply ask your subscribers. They’ve opted in to receive content from you, so you can entice them to get similar content on the platforms they’re already on.

As you can see below, Crate & Barrel has a small “Get Social With Us” section at the bottom of their emails. In it are social buttons of all the social channels they’re in, letting their subscribers follow them on whichever platform they prefer.

Alternatively, you can straight up send an email encouraging subscribers to engage with you on social media, as McDonald’s does below.

It even has a great two-fold call to action (more on this later) – “Keep us in your pocket with our mobile app. Or follow us!” This approach is also a great way towards becoming an integrated mobile driven business.

Weave social media into email campaigns

Here are some of the ways you can do this:

• Upload your subscriber list to social networks – Following your subscribers on different social channels gives you an idea of their interests, preferences, and the types of content they engage with. This also lets them know that you’re on the platform, so if they find your content interesting enough, they just might give you a follow back.
• Add a live social feed in your emails – Third-party tools like Zapier allows you to include live Twitter and Instagram feeds in your emails. So when a subscriber likes a post, they can click on it and be redirected to the social account, making it a great way to get organic engagement and following.
  
• Retarget active email subscribers with social media ads – These days, it’s all about multichannel marketing, and a great way to go about it is matching intent and interest with targeted ads. For example, if a subscriber showed interest in a particular product, you can keep showing that same product on their social feeds with Facebook advertising. This way, you’re not only keeping the product in their minds, you know you’re reaching out to qualified prospects.

Incentivize subscribers who engage on social

For example, you can send an email offering a 10% discount for subscribers who like your page and share a particular post. You can even give an additional 5% for every one of their friends that does the same. Additionally, you can also host the incentive on your website, enticing more traffic along the way.

Add more calls-to-action

Sometimes, your subscribers just need to be told what to do. This is why you need to add compelling calls-to-action whenever you can. Whether it’s following you on social media, sharing a link, or reposting content, entice your subscribers to engage by telling them exactly what to do. As well, explaining what they get in return for following up on your CTA also helps in convincing them to oblige.

It also doesn’t have to be all about your social media, as you can see below, where multiple CTAs are placed.

Incorporate a social media contest

Everybody loves contests, and you can leverage users’ affinity for contests (and prizes) by making yours fun and engaging. Alternatively, you can just make it easy for people to join as Diamond Candles did with their contest below.

Every week, they ran a sweepstakes on their Facebook page. This created a habit, excitement, and expectation – turning those who were merely aware of their brand to fans. In less than six weeks, the brand was able to generate 30,000 leads and 148,000 Facebook followers.

Come up with a plan and stick with it

Building your social media following takes time regardless of how sound your tactics might be. The important thing is to come up with a solid plan and practice enough patience in thoroughly implementing it. Now, sticking with a plan doesn’t mean you can’t tweak a few things. See what works and what doesn’t and adjust your plan accordingly.

Takeaway

The good thing about using email marketing to build your social following is that subscribers are already aware of what you do and what value you can potentially bring. Getting them to engage with you is just taking your relationship to the next step.

But before you begin to think about growing your social following thru email, make sure you have a healthy list that’s actively engaging with your content. Once you have that, it’s easier for you to grow your followers.

The post Social Mail: How To Use Email Marketing To Build You Social Following appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

As with any craft, there are those who are capable of further pushing the envelope and transform what was otherwise an ordinary material into an amazing artwork. Look into the lives of these seven ingenious papercraft sculpture artists and see how they gave life to regular pieces of paper:

Jeff Nishinaka

This man has been building his reputation as a paper artist for three decades. A pride of Los Angeles, Jeff Nishinaka earned his undergraduate degree from UCLA and then went to pursue his craft and career at Art Center College of Design, a distinguished art school in California.

Though Nishinaka was originally interested in painting, his experiences in Art Center enhanced his talent by handling different elements, including paper. The realization that paper was a very flexible medium converted him to creating masterpieces by shaping it and still maintaining its character. Some of the most popular brands that benefited from Nishinaka’s ingenuity were Paramount Pictures, Visa, and Coca Cola.

Cheong-ah Hwang

Born and raised in South Korea, Cheong-ah Hwang was blessed with a natural gift in creating art, especially when it comes to manipulating paper. Her fascination with this medium began at a young age as her parents ran a printing shop in her hometown. Her access to different kinds of paper unleashed her innate potential in making ornate pieces out of them.

Now living in the US, Cheong-ah Hwang has made a name for herself through her amazing skills. Among her most famous projects was a 2010 campaign for Kickstarter, an organization that funds creative programs. This project allowed her to reproduce her complicated pieces and be sold at significantly cheaper prices. She is also known for creating the cover image for Grimm Tales for Young and Old, a book written by famous author Philip Pullman.

Alexei Lyapunov and Lena Ehrlich

The focus of this duo’s art is creating 3D figures and settings using paper. Alexei Lyapunov and Lena Ehrlich, both from Russia, maximize the use of cutting and slicing tools, tweezers, rulers, and metal wirings when making their elaborate works of art.

Some of their most remarkable paper sculptures include music icons Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles. They are also applauded for their elaborate 3D miniature installations entitled “People Too.” This particular piece depicts mundane scenarios, such as an office setting and airplane travel, laced with a sense of humor and livened by vibrant colored paper.

Yulia Brodskaya

Another brilliant paper artist from Russia is Yulia Brodskaya. Even before undergoing formal art education, Brodskaya has already developed her interest in origami, collage, and textile painting. When she finally moved to the United Kingdom and took a master’s degree at the University of Hertfordshire, she incorporated three of the things she loved the most—paper, typography, and intricately-detailed handicrafts—and gave birth to magnificent projects that only a true artist can pull off.

Yulias hard work surely paid off seeing as some of her clients include the largest brands in the world, such as Hermes, Starbucks, and Nokia.

Peter Callesen

One of paper’s apparent characteristics is its frailty, but a real artist knows how to put such things to his or her advantage. This is what Danish paper artist Peter Callesen does to paper once he begins his magic—a ‘flimsy-looking’ material metamorphoses into a structure conveying a message.

Along with creating 2D and 3D paper sculptures, Callesen specializes in reliving his personal interests, his memories, and even classic stories in his work. He effectively transforms a flat piece of paper into a 3D sculpture by cutting parts of a single sheet and using those exact pieces to form detailed figures. The result? It looks as if the final product literally rose from their paper graves and was brought to life.

Ingrid Siliakus

Working with paper can be quite exhausting but given sufficient talent, imagination, and patience, a dedicated artist can turn one sheet into a multi-dimensional centerpiece. This is what Dutch artist Ingrid Siliakus has been doing for the past two decades. Inspired by the works of a Japanese professor and artist Masahiro Chatani, Siliakus began researching about the art that could be done with cutting and folding paper.

After a few years of studying, she began rendering her own grand paper architectures. Siliakus’ creations can be considered as the product of marrying two disciplines of paper art—origami and pop-up. Before she was able to design pieces by herself, she created paper renditions of famous buildings, such as Spain’s Palace Del Marques De Salamanca.

Bovey Lee

Artist Bovey Lee was bestowed with multiple blessings that helped her reach the state where she is now—literally and figuratively. After finishing fine arts in her homeland, Hong Kong, she pursued painting at the University of Berkeley in California and then took digital arts at the Pratt Institute in New York. Though she was originally into painting, she eventually discovered her passion for paper cutting.

Bovey has succeeded in incorporating her native culture to her art by choosing to work with rice paper. Rice paper has characteristics ideal for her projects, and it allowed her to practice the centuries-old Chinese art of paper cutting. Many of her works have been exhibited in the most prominent museums in the world, such as the Museum of Fine Arts in China, Fukuoka Museum of Art in Japan, and Brooklyn Museum of Art in the United States.

Paper has served a great many functions in art. From being a canvas to being actual artworks itself, paper has proven to be one of the most indispensable media in creating masterpieces.

The post 7 Amazing Papercraft Sculpture Artists appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Here are the best ways to go about improving your site’s conversion rates in 2019.

Voice Engine Optimization

Voice search continues to gain popularity and acceptance, with research firms predicting that by 2020 up to 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice. This means that brands need to optimize for voice search if they wish to stay ahead of the game.

As pointed out by Search Engine Journal, the first organic search result on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) gets up to 35% of clicks. When it comes to voice search it’s even more crucial to rank at the top, as only the top three results are shown on mobile, and just one for smart speakers.

The key to voice engine optimization (VEO) is to optimize content, location and page/product/brand information. Voice search is quickly penetrating across industries, particularly for those looking for answers and information on-the-go.

Here are some of the things you should do for VEO:

• Optimize Business Information – Some $10.3 billion are lost annually just because of inaccurate or unavailable listings. That’s just far too much business to lose for something so rudimentary. Make sure your business listings (name, address, email, phone, socials, etc.) on your website are clear and consistent.

• Improve Page Load Time – As mentioned above, voice search is mainly utilized by those looking for on-the-go results. You may have the info/product they’re looking for, but if your page won’t load, you can kiss your chances of converting goodbye. Simply making your page load faster can improve your ecommerce conversion rate.

• Focus on Questions – Users have learned to speak to voice search like they were actual people. Instead of typing keywords as they would on a standard search, they ask questions. This means that you should work on conversational, long-tail keyword phrases in your site’s content as this enables you to answer natural language queries.

Email Marketing Hacks

Email marketing remains to be a powerful tool for customer acquisition – 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, marketing emails are six times more likely to earn a click-through than tweets. This means that if you aren’t focusing on optimizing your email marketing, you’re wasting a golden opportunity.

Personalized content has been all the rage for the past couple of years, but email personalization begins with the sender. Check out the image below. Names, even if you don’t know them, catch your attention better than “Grammarly Insights” or “Blogging Wizard.” It’s also easier to tune out promotional emails.

Once you get a sender name and subject line good enough for your email to be opened, you need to make sure that there’s value in the body. Understanding your segmented list allows you to provide content and a CTA that would resonate with the receiver.

Optimize Your Message Across all Social Channels

There’s layers to this strategy. One is you need to identify which platforms your audiences are in. Then, you need to understand the strengths of each network and the type of content that works best in each platform. For example, on Facebook, images get 53% more likes than average posts. The same applies in LinkedIn where posts with images get 98% more comments.

Once you establish a brand messaging, tailor it to the different platforms you’re utilizing to make sure they perform at optimal level.

Invest in Product Video Content

You can include the more comprehensive product specs. You can even display the most honest, useful user reviews. But unless they can see how your product actually works, your chances of converting remains mediocre at best.

Product videos provide them an up close look at what you’re selling without them actually using it. To see if it’s worth the investment, test it by producing video for your top performing products. When you see an uptick in sales, move on to the next tier of products.

Increase Conversions with the Help of Your Fans

As customers’ trust for brands continue to decline, and conversely trust their peers more and more, social proof and user-generated content (UGC) become an increasingly powerful conversion tool.

Here are some of the ways you can encourage fans to help you out:

• CTAs – You don’t get what you don’t ask for. Having strategically placed CTAs on your sites that encourage customers to share their thoughts and experiences helps in this regard. You can also put social buttons next to the CTA to allow them to share their thoughts in their preferred space. Additionally, you can even start a forum right in your website.
• Post-purchase follow-up – Send an email after a period wherein customers have had a chance to use your product asking them for a review. As noted by Search Engine Journal, UGC there are UGC marketing platforms that can automate this for you.

You can even offer incentives like a 10% discount on their next purchase if they leave a review.

Gamify

Gamification used to be a popular persuasion tactic (think being the mayor of a location in Foursquare, or getting badges in Waze) but has since waned in mass appeal. But, the reason why you should still implement some of its aspects is to tap on people’s need to be rewarded.

Instead of offering badges that are meaningless, cook up rewards that provide actual value. A simple yet effective example of this is Dropbox. They’ve come up with a list of CTAs that, in exchange for, they’ll reward you with additional storage space. This is simple, yet genius, as they’re not only offering a valuable reward, the reward is what their actual product.

Prioritize Human Intelligence

AI is the shiny new toy everyone’s looking to get a piece of. But the reality is, not everyone has the resources, or even the need to justify the infrastructure investment. What’s feasible for every business, though, is to invest in its people.

This popular joke concisely explains the concept:

CFO to CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?“

CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?“

To optimize every aspect of your operations, you need to invest in human intelligence – developing them to a level where it is both easy to trust their decisions, and allow free reign to experiment with ideas.

Use Exit Intent Polls

To optimize your website for conversion, you need to understand two main things:

• Where your visitors are leaving from
• Why they are leaving

The first part is simple enough, just go to Exit Pages in Google Analytics and request for a report.

Getting insights to the next one is where exit intent polls come in. This basically means that when visitors are about to leave the page, a poll is shown asking them why, for example, they are abandoning a cart. Does shipping take too long? Would they prefer same day fulfillment?

This will allow you to get a clearer picture of why visitors are leaving, and what you can do to improve the user experience on your site. You can find a complete guide on how to set up exit intent polls here.

Advanced SMS Marketing

While it seems outdated in the face of all other marketing channels, SMS remains an effective tool because they go straight to where people spend their time the most – their phones. Additionally, SMS is set up that even when you don’t tap it, you’re able to see the message. This leads to over 90% of all text messages being read within five minutes.

Another benefit of utilizing SMS marketing is that not a lot of brands are using it. This means that while people have been accustomed to ignoring promotional emails, people still read their texts. So if you find yourself with the resources (meaning enough mobile numbers), SMS marketing is a solid avenue you should tap.

Takeaway

Conversion may not always equate to sales and revenue, but it is almost always tied up with the bottom line. Analyze which of the points above are applicable to your business and see your conversion rates rise.

The post Strategies to Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rate in 2019 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

With staggering amounts of information being sent in the form of discussions, social cues, and other online interactions, participation is absolutely necessary for entrepreneurs to keep up and stay relevant. But in order to participate effectively with your target audience, to gather information and filter out what’s really important, you must listen to what they have to say.

Which social media platform is the Best for Your Brand?

Social listening tools play an important role in helping you market your brand by letting you know the following key information:

1. Where People Are Active

Tools for social listening allow you to categorize online mentions, enabling you to see what proportion of your audience published content on various social media platforms.

You can then initiate conversation with them and accumulate resources for marketing on these platforms. By knowing where people spend their time and energy, you will know where to spend yours.

2. Trend Identification

Social listening tools allow you to pinpoint keywords, esoteric terms, and phrases for you to relate to your consumers because knowing what people say about your products allows you to get in on the conversation, and even get ahead of it.

By coming to understand associated conversations, you will also gain insight from your audience’s overall impression about the entire range of products in your market, including those produced by your competition.

3. Influencer Identification

Identifying the influencers among your audience allows you to relate with your audience, and turn them into influencers in your favor. Gain rapport and learn about what matters to them. By establishing a relationship with these key players, they will use their influence to help you establish your brand.

4. How Your Brand Is Perceived

Your brand could target the high-end market if you wanted, but are you sure everyone sees it that way, too? Social listening tools determine whether your marketing messages are actually making headway with your audience.

By analyzing and categorizing their mentions of your brand into positive and negative sentiments, you’ll know whether you’ve positioned your brand to target the right market.

5. Discover Most Common Pain Points

For new brands, troubleshooting their products’ problem areas is crucial. Using the social listening tools to isolate the conversations about these areas for improvement, you can improve and repair your product, brand and reputation.

6. Level The Playing Field

Wondering what your competition is thinking, or what they’re up to? Feed industry-relevant keywords into your social listening tool.

That way, you will have all of the conversations that are available to the public at your fingertips. You will be able to see what advantages your competition is using, and how people feel about this new technology. Use this knowledge to bring yourself up to their level.

7. What Qualities Are Important For Them In Products

Customer insights about products are everywhere, seen in customer reviews, opinion and preference polls, as well as brand perception discussions. Through in-depth analysis, social listening tools provide details on what customers feel are the most important qualities of the products they buy, intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influence their purchases, and also the critical qualities that make a brand stand above the competition.

8. What Customers Like About Products

Marketing strategy is important, and so is how you focus your strategy to accommodate your customers’ preferences. By knowing the triggers that are most influential in their purchase decisions, you can emphasize the selling points for your products, and your products will move even faster.

9. How To Develop Better Products

In line with discovering the most common pain points, social listening also allows customers the chance to be heard when voicing their concerns about how to make a product better. When customers feel like they are being heard, you are more likely to retain them as customers, instead of losing them to the competition.

10. Content Ideas

Social listening distills Internet noise into practical information, which you can use to develop content that directly addresses your customers’ problems and questions. For example, if a majority of users are unaware about how to use a new feature of your latest product, you can implement the answer in your content strategy.

11. How They Engage With Content

Does your audience engage in lively or even heated discussion about your brand or industry, or are they more likely to click “Like” and be done with it? Social listening helps you to gauge your audience’s collective outspokenness, and avoid inappropriate or unnecessary engagement of your audience, keeping you on the safe side.

12. Context In Which Users Write About You

Sometimes, online conversations contain ideas that require contextualization, especially when polarizing viewpoints come to light. Social listening tools help to put your audience’s thoughts in context, allowing you to see the bigger picture.

13. Understanding Your Data Source

Data that does not represent your audience, or is otherwise misleading, can do more harm than good. It is important to know for certain whether your sources are authentic, and that the data coming from the channels you’ve selected matches up with the demographics of your customers.

14. Improve Agility

Agility in social media refers to your reaction time when addressing an issue, whether it is positive feedback, a complaint, or a neutral mention. As mentioned above, customers like being listened to, and your ability to respond to their concerns swiftly can immensely help you build a positive brand image. Social listening tools help you stay in the loop.

15. Social Recruiting

Social listening tools have particular hidden value in discovering talent – not just influencers, but also key experts, marketers and technicians who can help you build your brand with a fresh perspective.

Chances are your social listening tools are working wonders for you, so let us know. Share your experiences and comment below.

The post 15 Important Things You Can Learn About Your Audience From Social Listening appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Many website owners believe this means merely making their interfaces smaller to accommodate the size constraints of the typical mobile device, be it a smartphone or a tablet. The fact is, mobile sites works differently from desktop sites.

Mobile has far more limitations, such as dependence on a battery, wireless connectivity, and of course screen space. Functionality does not always easily translate in a smaller screen. In most cases, a mobile-friendly design requires a certain differentiation. Here are some approaches to mobile design you should consider.

Mobile-First

Many website developers today design for mobile use first, and then desktop. Because of the screen size limitations, they quickly learned that less is more, and to keep minimal features in the design. It is a matter of focusing on important aspects of the site, and enabling users to easily execute key tasks that would benefit the business.

The key to this mobile first approach is to identify the main categories, prioritize them, and then design for the smallest screen first. You can add more elements (in order of priority) as you move up the screen sizes.

Simple Menus and Navigation

Menus and navigation elements are as important with mobile as it is on desktop. However, the typical menu bar in a desktop site is way too big for a mobile site, so in most cases it is better to use a hamburger icon (which is easily recognizable) or a drop down accordion menu and place it on the top right or left of the screen.

Multilevel menus also present a problem in mobile, because users normally will not want to go through several taps to access what they need. The maximum would be two taps before a user will abandon the site, in contrast to the lengths to which a user will go through on a desktop site.

The trick is to show only the most important parts of your website, those that your users are most likely to want or need. Avoid putting too many options and widgets on your page. Here are some navigation mistakes you should avoid.

Value Creation

It is true that a mobile-version of your website is a must if your business wants to tap into the mobile market. It will certainly help with optimizing your site for search engines. However, your mobile app itself may not get any traction with your users if they cannot find any value in it.

Your mobile app or site should bring something to the table for the end user to motivate them to download and install it, or to bookmark it. This includes making it easier to pay for something, getting a discount, or obtaining vital information quickly. Banking, communications, and newsfeeds are typically useful mobile sites that most people use on a daily basis.

You should strive to create that kind of value for your business for mobile users. If you are able to create value for your mobile app, then all your efforts in designing and creating the mobile site or app will not be in vain.

Keep Your Layout Liquid

You might think that you can design your mobile website for a fixed 320-pixel break point (which is the most common size for mobile) and call it good, but the fact is mobile has a wide range of dimensions, from 176 to 600 pixels.

You need a liquid layout so that it will adjust fluidly no matter the dimensions of the mobile screen. You need a mobile design defined in percentages instead of a fixed number of pixels so that it will not matter what mobile device the user has. The site will be responsive, which is what you want for ease of use.

Touchscreen Functionality

Most mobile devices nowadays use touchscreens, and users are used to interacting with them in that manner. Designing a mobile site is thus more challenging, because you need to account for differences in finger sizes, textures, and pressure in order for the screen to respond accurately.

You have to make sure that all elements that require a user’s input such as buttons and forms are large enough and do not overlap. You cannot rely on the use of styluses or keypads that some older mobile devices may have.

You can use the swipe and pinch functions standard in many mobile devices to help you with your design. You can put in more clickable elements that way.

User Centricity

The key to designing your mobile website is to keep the user in mind. You need to follow certain patterns to improve the user experience. These include:

• Keeping controls big and at the bottom of the screen, to make it easier for the user to see content and manipulate them as necessary.
• Making it easy for the user to find what they need.
• Keeping all the elements intuitive and consistent, so users won’t have a hard time trying to figure out how to use the site.
• Minimizing the need for user input, using auto-correct whenever possible, and supporting the use of a landscape orientation.
• Using default values to pre-populate forms.

Feature Utility

Mobile devices have limitations, but they also have features you will not find in a desktop. These include slide to unlock, GPS, gestures, gyrometers, and location services. You can use these mobile-specific features to enhance the user’s experience with your app.

A good example of putting a mobile-specific feature to good use is a discount site using location services to help users find specific stores. The swipe function also comes in handy for some dating websites. Use your imagination for creating opportunities to give your end-users an appreciation of your mobile app or site.

Keep on Task

Many mobile users may get interrupted while they are on a mobile site or app, forcing them to close it without completing a task. It could be a call coming in, the boss comes in, or the light turns green.

In any case, it is important to make sure that your user can pick off where they left off upon opening the site or app again. You can design it so that it is easy and quick to restart the site or app, and your users will appreciate it.

Conclusion

A mobile site or app caters to the growing need of users to be on the go without sacrificing access to their favorite websites. However, designing a responsive and engaging one is not as easy as it sounds. Certain limitations and features of mobile devices pose a challenge for web designers that want to make the user experience seamless and positive. These tips can guide you in creating a true mobile functional design for your business.

You might also like to read about the The Dos and Dont’s of Mastering Responsive Web Design.

The post Tips for Creating a Truly Functional Mobile Experience appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

It is important to note that UX does not just refer to web or mobile app design. It refers to all your digital collaterals, not the least of which are the emails you send to your subscribers.

A majority of all marketers consider email the most effective tool for generating leads, so you can imagine why you should give your email marketing campaigns due attention.

Here is how to optimize them with the right UX design.

The Email-UX Connection

UX expert Jakob Nielsen states that the average user spends just 51 seconds on a marketing email, most (81%) simply scanning it instead of reading it through. This is because most users are inundated with so much information that they have to skim through most of what they receive and only give time for content they find truly interesting or important.

If your email is text-heavy, hard to scan, requires a download, and/or loads slowly, then the UX leaves much to be desired. If you want subscribers to read it, you have to pay particular attention to some key UX issues. Let this UX guide show you those issues.

Send Only Relevant Content

You may not immediately connect content with UX, but user experience refers to the whole of it, and that includes how much satisfaction you get from opening and reading the message. No one likes to waste their time on an email that doesn’t have any relevance or value to them, so you have to make sure your email content has both for your recipients.

Highlight Your Call to Action

The main purpose of your email is to get your readers to take the desired action, such as clicking on a link or button. Make sure your call to action jumps out at the reader as soon as the email is opened. Readers are more likely to read a bit more of the text so that they can decide whether to answer the call to action or not.

Focus on Typography

Because marketing emails tend to be mostly text (or text-graphics), you have to pay special attention to your typography. You have to make sure the text is easy to read, and the background is not too busy or distracting.

Visual content is always a winner, but you have to make sure it will not slow the loading time too much, or your hard work may face deletion.

Test the Links

You may feel that double-checking that the primary link in your newsletter actually works borders on OCD, but it is a necessary part of your UX. In fact, it should be part of the SOP for email marketing campaigns. Links in your email are not going to generate leads if they don’t work and will also give the recipient a poor opinion of your company.

Link to a Relevant Landing Page

Sure, you can send your email recipient to your homepage. However, unless you actually have something there that your readers will want to see, you are forcing them to search for the relevant page on your website in connection with your email.

Instead of the homepage, link your newsletter to a landing page directly connected to your email message, and make sure you give more information than is available in the email and with the appropriate call to action.

Check for Typos

Another seemingly obvious practice that is often overlooked is proofreading and editing your work to check for grammatical, spelling, or typing errors in your copy. Misspelled or sloppy content elicits a negative impression on your readers, and emails with these gaffes will be (mostly) confined to the trash.

Design for Mobile

Did you know that more than half (54%) of all emails are read on mobile? If you have ever tried reading anything on a smartphone, you know how frustrating it can be when not all of the content fits into the screen, so you have to move sideways to see everything.

Do you think most people would bother to read an entire email message, let alone click on the link, in that situation? Would you? Follow these tips for mobile-friendly emails, and your click-through rates will improve immensely.

Keep Your Design Consistent

What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. While this typically refers to gender equality, the same idea can be applied to email marketing. Make sure the look and tone of the email message are consistent with the branding on your site so that it is instantly recognizable. Use logos, colors, fonts, and visual content that reflects your brand.

Make it Accessible

When designing your newsletter, you should think about accessibility. Some of your readers may have poor eyesight, so you want to make sure the text has good contrast with a good amount of white space and the fonts are readable. You should also make sure your call-to-action buttons or links are nice and big, so they are easy to find and click on, even on a mobile device.

Test it for UX

Perhaps the best way to make sure you have a good email-UX connection to make the most of your email marketing campaign is to send test messages. Check if your newsletter works well on various devices and clients if it loads quickly (within 3-5 seconds), and test the links to make sure they work.

Get feedback from test recipients by asking them directly or checking the open and click-through rates. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, after all! You can also use a tool like Litmus to check if your email is compatible across different email platforms and browsers as well as devices before sending it out.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a simple and effective tool in your repertoire of marketing tactics. A positive UX can increase its effectiveness immeasurably. Follow these simple and straightforward optimization tips for the easiest tweaks ever!

Do you know of any other way UX can optimize your email marketing campaigns? Give us a heads-up in the comments below.

The post How to Optimize the UX of Your Email Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

However, it is not as easy as it looks, especially for mobile. With an increasing number of people using mobile-only for their web browsing, this is an important consideration. Striking the balance between a great page and a fast page can be an exercise in futility. Fortunately, you now have Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP to help you gain some traction with your mobile pages.

What is it?

Google rolled out AMP in October 2015. An open-source framework, it enables mobile web pages to load quickly. It is intended to help web publishers quickly improve their loading speed even while running ads, which is a major source of revenue for many websites. Many publishers can actually do this on their own, but it requires some intensive optimizations that they may not be able to implement effectively. AMP simply makes it easier to achieve optimal results for everyone, including mobile users.

AMP is slated for future integration into the Google platform, as well as other web technology companies, so it would be good to put it in now. As an early adopter, you can wow your users before too many sites get onboard with AMP. By then, the higher speed is no longer awesome but simply standard.

How Does it Work?

There are three basic parts to AMP: the markup language, the resource handling, and the content delivery network (CDN). The AMP HTML is just like the standard HTML save for some restrictions, properties, and custom tags. The good thing about this is if you are already familiar with standard HTML, your learning curve is small. Here is how to create your AMP HTML page. The way it works is that AMP documents are designed to render the parts of the page above the fold and not resource intensive. The page loads many of the elements before the user has time to get impatient, and this gives your page time to load the rest of the elements, including ads.

The AMP JavaScript comes in handy when you have some interactive elements in your mobile web page such as polls or lightboxes. In general, however, the developers of AMP are trying to do away with JavaScript altogether by using web components and custom elements. It is a work in progress, however, so in the meantime, you may want to keep interactive elements to a minimum. You cannot use JavaScript from a third party, by the way, so that is not an option for you.

The AMP CDN is an option at this point. Currently, Google is providing the caching and optimizations of AMP pages using their CDN service. However, you can also make your own CDN, or use a web server.

What Should I Expect?

To achieve optimal mobile speed, you do have to change a few things in your work process. You will need to maintain two versions of all your pages. One is your desktop web page version, aka standard, and the AMP version. In the standard version, you can keep all the bells and whistles that require JavaScript, while the AMP version will do away with most of them. You can still keep some of the elements by using iframes, particularly lead capture forms.

You will also have to redo your site template because AMP requires all CSS style sheets to be less than 50KB and in-line. All custom fonts also have to be loaded using an amp-font extension. The same restrictions apply to regular images, which must be a specific width and height, and must use a runtime managed amp-img element; animated figs require an amp-anim extended component… HTML5 locally hosted videos will use amp-video, while embedded YouTube videos use amp-youtube. None of these changes are hard to implement, but you do have to plan your site design around them.

Most importantly, you need to flag your pages as AMP-enabled by using the tag <link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/blog-post/amp/">. This tells Google and other AMP project supporting technologies that you are onboard. You should also use Schema.org meta data to identify the type of content on the page i.e. article, recipe, review, to get you into the Google Search news carousel. Here are other ways to make your page discoverable.

How Can You Use it to Boost Your Page Ranking?

The main purpose of AMP is to make your pages load really fast. Initial testing of the protocol shows speed improvements of up to 85% on 3G connections. That means if your site’s page currently loads in three seconds (if you’re doing your job right that should be the minimum speed), then it will load in 0.45 seconds, which is practically instantly.

That is pretty impressive, and the developers are still trying to make it even faster. You can apply the same improvements for all your other pages, and it is simple enough to do, so why not? The main benefit of AMP HTML is you only need to send a small number of HTTP requests to load a page, and that means even with slow connections, you achieve a respectable speed.

The increased loading speed can help you snag users as well as improve your relevance for ad placers. AMP supports a wide range of ad formats, which is why many of the top ad networks are using the amp-ad extension component. If you are AMP-enabled, you are more likely to attract the attention of these ad networks, which means more money coming your way.

Conclusion

It makes perfect sense to AMP your mobile web pages. You not only improve the user experience, you make your site more visible on Google and other search engines, and more eligible for AMP-supported ad networks. With just a little elbow grease, you can boost your page ranking with AMP.

The post Implementing AMP to Boost Your Page Loading Times appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.