PixelMEDIA Inc.

Riding the Boston subway recently, I noticed several people crowded around one of the doors in the center of the car despite a clearly worded warning: DO NOT STAND IN FRONT OF DOORS. They stayed at the door during several stops, but did not get off. People getting on and off had to squeeze by them. The train wasn’t especially crowded; there was plenty of space away from the doors. So why were these people huddled in the one spot they were not supposed to be?

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If you have participated in taking a website in a new design direction, you may have noticed the difficulty in separating the form from the function. Here at PixelMEDIA, we employ a useful deliverable know as a mood board. In its simplest form, a mood board combines numerous elements into a collage that establishes an overall tone and creative direction. In many cases, we use it when a brand “refresh” is needed or if there is a lack of defined brand guidelines for the web channel. If you are currently working on a complete rebrand, you may consider this method as way to explore and establish typography, a color palette, or a style of a photography or illustration.

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Will 2010 finally be the year that Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) loses enough market share that developers no longer need to support it?  I know I speak for not only myself but for many of my developer colleagues when I say, “one can hope!”  IE6 will be 9 years old this year and yet there is still a column for it on our QA checklist.   Windows has come out with two newer (and better) browsers within the last 9 years that we also support; yet developers typically code for the most recent version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.  So why do we need to support a version of IE that in today’s technology space is equivalent to a fossil? (Read More…)

Spammers are pretty clever. Wait, scratch that. Spammers are extremely clever – and becoming more-so every day. Their deviant techniques constantly evolve and for anyone that runs a website, keeping up with preventive maintenance is an ongoing challenge.

In the past, keeping spam off your blog was comparatively easy. Basically, you would block, erase or refuse any comment that provoked the user to buy Viagra, or click on adult links. As long as you monitored the comments, you would be OK.

Now, not so much. Modern spammers have taken it up a notch, and their “junk mail” is getting past a lot of moderators.

Spam will never go away, but there are a few things you can learn that will help you better deal with it. (Read More…)

As “Web Analytics” becomes an increasingly hot topic in our digital world, there seems to be more and more confusion about what it really means and why it is important.  Web Analytics is currently the most effective way you can measure whether your web properties are performing successfully.  Haven’t you always wanted a concrete answer to the question, “How is our website doing?”  Well, that is exactly what web analytics can tell you.

If you have already started down the web analytics path, it is important to note that there will be preconceived notions about Web Analytics that may take considerable effort to adjust.  Senior management may already be keeping an eye on website traffic, page views, or bounce rates, but those numbers are only important in light of your business goals and website objectives.

For example, a client of ours routinely provided website visit data to senior management, who relied on this information to measure the ROI of their corporate website.  If  traffic was going up, everyone was happy, but when traffic was trending down, the site was thought to be underperforming.  Yet, their business was not driven by site visits, but by sales, which are measured in submitted leads from the various forms.  A well-targeted search engine marketing campaign may actually bring fewer, but better qualified leads.  If site traffic goes down, but sales increase; management should be pleased – but they won’t see the gains if they are not paying attention to the right metrics. 

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Even after all these years, a handful of reminders help me get off to a good start whenever I sit down to write or edit a web page. It’s not about being creative and using big words, it’s about respecting the time and intelligence of the reader. By the way, most of these apply equally well when writing for print, direct mail, and everyday email.

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We get it. You don’t need a website, social community, content management system, brand redesign, or flash demo. You need customers, loyal fans, email from people who want your products, and inquiries about the services you offer. You want to connect with people.

Last night PixelMEDIA hosted the monthly meeting of the NH Usability Professional Association (NH UPA). The meetings are an opportunity for user experience professionals to connect with each other. Talks included our own Luke Michel (watch his crowd-pleasing discussion about punctuation) as well as John Herman, a local media maker in his own right. As a newcomer to the NH UPA gatherings, John said two things that made me think about the way we communicate. The first:

I have no idea what you’ve been saying for the last 45 minutes but you sound like smart people and I think we do about the same thing.

As people engrained in what we do every day, we can all get hung up on industry vernacular, catch phrases, and tech-speak that the audience we’re trying to reach may not understand. And while one may say that it was a gathering of peers—so we can use our language—even within our own networks we can improve understanding by avoiding terms that mean different things to different people.

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You’ve done the keyword research for your site and optimized the content for appropriate terms. You’re actively engaged in a link building campaign and your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign has a very high click-thru-rate (CTR). Additionally, you’re analytics program is showing excellent site metrics. Users are getting to your site so what’s the problem? The problem is that your site is not generating enough leads.

A major factor hindering your lead generation is the size of your web form(s). Users get overwhelmed with the length of the form and abandon the page. It is understandable that you want to collect as much information about a possible lead, but it is not always practical.

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As a teen in the 80′s the Rubiks Cube was more than a puzzle, it was a personal challenge. I had friends that had managed to master it, without help, whereas I never got past the first few stages. The motto at the time was “you can’t do the cube”. Even it’s inventor, Erno Rubik, who first showed this puzzle at a toy fair, had not figured it out yet. 

Fast forward to today and the Rubik’s Cube is back, and with a new tagline – “You CAN Do the Rubik’s Cube“. This change in approach is a friendlier challenge – one of encouragement. And it’s supported  by a robust campaign to introduce the Rubik’s Cube into schools, summer programs, youth organizations and after-school programs, to start. (Read More…)

We published this at about 5 last night. It was a 13 day sprint, and we jammed. We were super focused. It’s late on July Fourth and I just took my first look at the site, the whole thing. Remotely. I like it. I have a page of updates, of course, the d’oh! list. It’s amazing what a day and a new environment can do. I felt like “a user”, just cruising around. Exploring everything.

However… it was not a flawless launch. There was a last minute freak out moment. You know what I mean — you’re ready. You’ve looked at everything ten times, some twenty.

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