BlogmyQuery – BMQ

For years you have been searching for it. You hear the question being asked in your dreams as you go on an Indiana-Jones-type-crusade to find the answer. When the answer comes to you, you know that the confetti will fall from the ceiling and the band will start playing your favorite song. You might even get a kiss from that special someone. So what is this question?

What is the secret to Web design?

A tough question and one that might not have an answer. In 2006, Oliver Reichenstein wrote Web Design is 95% Typography. Some people loved it, others were not so amused. If Web design was based that much on typography, then what was the point of learning anything else? All you needed to do is understand the elements of typography and you were good to go.

Of course typography doesn’t mean font selection. With the advent of @font-face and services such as Typekit, Webtype, Fontdeck, and Google Web fonts, your skills in typography won’t improve. You can easily create wonderful designs with one font for the rest of your life if you choose to—they had to do it centuries ago and they didn’t have Photoshop sticking things to guides for them. If anything, more font selection will make things worse for you because creativity and beauty become hard to achieves when more options are given to us.

More toys means more fun though, right? If you want to go that route, then by all means go for it. I love to look at the different fonts being used and admire anyone that can successfully pull off using newer fonts for the Web. However, I’ve seen too many times what can happen when development options are given to the masses, and it isn’t pretty (re: Myspace). Instead of having a user agreement it would be cool if Typekit made you read a book on typography before you could begin using a font—the Web would improve tenfold, if that was the case.

I’m not being sarcastic, saying that is all you need to know for a majority of websites. Try going through all of the Web designs that you love, strip out the images and ask yourself “how would that website look with just text and spacing?”. When designers say “text is the interface”, they really do mean it. The iA site is a great example of that.

Information Architects is based around strong typography.

One of my all time favorite designs is A Working Library. The site is a showcase of text being the interface. The spacing is just right and the typography is on point.

A Working Library by Mandy Brown.

Some people find design like this to be dull and boring, they feel that design should have more pop to it. At the end of the day some extra visual flair might be what separates your design from the rest, but you need to get the first 95% down. The website that you are reading this article on now has done a wonderful job of presenting a visual design that isn’t reliant on images to be beautiful.

Well That Isn’t Hard

It’s possible to create a wonderful design without the use of images at all. I know that sounds crazy, but it is possible. I’m not saying it should be done, but if we can create elegance simply with typography and white space, then why shouldn’t we be able to create greatness when we start throwing in images, videos and other effects?

With the use of images I’m not talking about images that are needed to represent something such as icons, but images that are there for flare. Sometimes a picture is worth at least ten better words than any word you could use, so it’s better to go with an image (but you still need to consider using white space with it).

Here are two more examples of beautiful websites that place a heavy emphasis on typography to control the design. The first is Blake Allen Design and the second is The Harriet Series (both use images to represent their typography, but you get the point).

Blake Allen Design uses images, but with great typography.

The Harriet Series by OkayType.

What makes the two designs above so interesting to me is that the typography not only guides you along a journey, but it does so with personality. You almost feel as if the typography is an expression of the person that designed it. Blake Allen uses Helvetica which gives the website a Swiss, clean and structured personality. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Harriet Series website is a bit more playful and experimental—there is beauty in the organized chaos that the typography creates.

For 99% of the designs out there, typography and white space are going to be your underlying foundation. So if you can’t get them right, then the rest of your design has nothing to stand on. Stop worrying about the pop of your design and first worry about how it will stand tall. Once you get that down then you can begin to dress it up.

Clear is a very simple to do list application for iOS devices. While the majority of the excitement around it are the gestures used to control the interface, you will notice that the typography does enough to get out of the way and allow you to enjoy the application. Sure it is nothing more than Helvetica, but what if it was Comic Sans and had bad spacing all around? Great typography doesn’t have to stand out in a good way, but that doesn’t mean it should do enough harm when it stands out in a negative way, either.

Typography In Other Disciplines

Art of the Menu is a great website on menu design.

The Art of the Menu does a great job of showing the importance of typography in menu design. While a lot of restaurants like to add images and illustrations to their menus to give them a bit more pizzaz, they fail in providing a decent typographical structure that allows you to easily browse through the menu.

If you are a designer you have no excuse to say you can’t come up with a decent design. When you create a design that lacks a strong foundation, anything else you add to it is just going to make it worse. Too many designers attempt to save their designs with fluff without understanding they are pouring gasoline onto the fire. If a design is not enjoyable to read then it is not an enjoyable experience, no matter how many images, colors or sounds you decide to add to it.

Looking to understand typography a little bit better? Not too long ago Smashing Magazine did a comprehensive overview of some wonderful typography tools and resources.

(jvb)

© Paul Scrivens for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

There is a paradox that fits my life. Doesn’t matter what aspect of my life I am talking about because it always seems to apply. Even more so when I think about this paradox and the design of this website and other websites. I really hate this paradox.

“To walk through the woods, you first need to walk halfway through. Then, once you’re in the middle of it, you still need to walk half of the remaining distance, then half of the distance again, and then another half, and you can never successfully make it through the woods.”

This example is based off of Zeno’s paradoxes, which are even more mind-boggling than the one above.

No matter what stage of a design I am in, I am always halfway there. This is why you might find yourself always saying that you need two more weeks to finish up all the details. It will always be two more weeks no matter what, because all you did was get halfway from where you were to where you are trying to go. Using this mentality can wear you down, but if you twist it around a bit, it can be used as motivation to achieve a successful design.

A Totally Made Up Theory

Let’s use our good ol’ sparring partner Google as an example. You are about to sit down and create the first home page in Google’s history. If you had an infinite amount of time you could tackle any part of the design that you wanted without any worries. But unfortunately life doesn’t give us non-deadlined projects. Because of this, you know the goal that you are striving to achieve—you know what it looks like once you leave the woods, so first, you just have to get halfway there.

If the very first half makes the design at least 50% usable then what would you design first? The logo? The footer? The obvious choice would be the search box and button. In fact, if you design that, then you are probably over 50% of the way through with the design because the website is now usable. It’s good to get that first 50% out of the way, and now you are halfway to your end goal. Some people like to call this working from the inside out.

Next step is to get halfway from where we are now to where we need to be. I think it’s important that we have some kind of branding on the page so people know where to come back to next time they want to search. That means I put the logo on the page. Once I am done with that I’m 75% of the way to my goal. 75% of the way through and how many people in the world would be satisfied with using Google if it had nothing but a logo, search bar and one button on it? I’m betting more than 75%. But if getting 75% of the way towards our goal can please even 75% of our audience, we might be doing a good job.

If you continue on with this process of knocking out half of what you need to do, eventually you will get close enough to your goal where good enough is as good as you are going to get. I know people argue about what good enough means, but if you are 99% of the way to where you are trying to go, then good enough is good enough.

MUD

In the startup community there is a term called minimum viable product.

“A Minimum Viable Product has just those features (and no more) that allows the product to be deployed.”

Minimum Viable Product, from Wikipedia

I’m coining the term Minimum Usable Design, and that is when you reach your 50% mark for your design. If you can’t use your design after you have reached 50% (or a person can’t understand at least 50% of what is going on) then you haven’t reached the 50% mark yet.

By no means does this imply that you should show your design to the public at the 50% mark, but you can use it as a way to gauge your progress. Sometimes you need to wait untill you are 99% done before showing your work to a larger audience. There is nothing wrong with striving for perfection, but it depends on your design and audience. Apple does minimum viable product with the limited features on their products, but make up for it with maximum viable design (a new term, crown me king).

An Example

Blog design is a very simplistic example, but lets run with it. On my website, Drawar, the main goal is to get people to read the content. If I can do that, I have achieved my number one goal, and it just so happens that this goal will keep the majority of my audience happy. Because of this, I want to make the content easy to get to, and so I need to know what design will help me get there.

The 50% mark. Not much, but it achieves the #1 goal.

With this design, anyone that comes to my website can read the content. That is 50% of my journey, but now I need to go the other half to reach another subset of people coming to my design. I decide next that there should be some branding on the website so that people can know where they are at and remember the website if they visit it again.

Now the design is 75% there.

Now when you visit the website you know where you are at, but notice that the additions didn’t take away from the original MUD that I created. From here I can take another halfway point journey by adding links to other sections of the website, and also provide a bit of context about the website they are on.

87.5% of the way…

Again, the additions do not take away from the original 50%, so that is a good thing. Time for one more halfway journey before I push the website out, and that would be adding some revenue.

93.75% complete (well, at least to me).

Basically the design is finished, but there are additional things I could add to the design to make it more complete to some people. For example, search, social media widgets, and possibly a blogroll. I’ve set the goals of the design though, so I understand the milestones that I want to achieve.

Design Is Never Finished

Although I’m happy with the end result of the design, it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone that visits. Someone will always want to get more out of a design, and that is why a design will never be able to leave the forest. Fortunately, the more halfway points you knock out in a design, the smaller the subset of people that are still wanting more out of it. Be careful though, because adding too much will take away from the original 50%, which was the main purpose of the design from the beginning.

And don’t think that this only applies to “minimalistic” websites—that is just my style of design, but it applies just as much to the designs that add a lot of flare to their aesthetic. Tweetbot, for example, isn’t any less of a usable design than other Twitter clients in my mind, because it adds a bit more flash to its design elements.

Always aim for the next halfway point and you will get closer and closer to the edge of the forest—but remember that you will never reach the end. Designs can always be improved upon, and therefore will always be unfinished.

Image on frontpage created by Libby Levi.

(jvb) (jc)

© Paul Scrivens for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

What if someone came to you and said, “I’ve designed this great website, but people don’t stay on it. Why?â€� How would you respond? Would you ask them whether they have done extensive A/B testing? Would you recommend testing the usability of the website?

People like to test a number of metrics to see why people are not staying on a website. I think sometimes we spend so much time focusing on analytics that we throw common sense out the window. Don’t get me wrong—analytics are a powerful tool for improving a website. But often the problem is right in front of your face.

What if you simply told them that the reason people are leaving is because of the way they designed the website? How mind-blowing an idea is that? Doesn’t that change your entire perspective on the design? It could be the greatest thing in the world, but what if you really designed something to chase people away or looking at it another way: What if you have designed it so there is no incentive to stay?

Feedback… Om Nom Nom

I love getting feedback on the stuff that I write; yet my website has no comments section. Is it reasonable for me to wonder why people don’t leave feedback? I could tell people that there is a forum on the website where they can leave feedback, but that means they would have to register, get approved and then remember what they wanted to write. The website isn’t designed for instant feedback.

When I didn’t have any social media widgets at the end of a post, sharing of articles dropped over 80%. It wasn’t fair for me to assume that people would remember to share something they liked or that if they were on the fence they would make an effort to do so. If I really wanted people to retweet what I write, I would have to guide them to doing so by putting a retweet widget at the end of everything. Maybe I could even add some text asking them to retweet if they like what they read.

The point is that, if I expect a person to take an action, I would have to design the process for taking that action right into the website itself. I should never assume that a person who is interacting with my website will automatically take that action. Would a driver stop at an intersection that had no stop sign?

As designers we have to understand that the interface we create dictates the action of the people using it.

If you run a website and hope to get a lot of comments, then the best way to go about that is to make posting a comment as easy as possible. Of course, doing so could lead to people leaving all types of comments, both useful and not. A great example of designing how you want users to interact with a product is Pinterest.

The Pinterest Way

Most comment blocks on Pinterest are filled with simple comments. The content doesn’t lend itself to much discussion, but Pinterest obviously wants users to engage in other social interactions, and it has designed the product to make that easy to do. You can easily like, comment, repin and share any image that you come across, and all of this makes the content spread quickly throughout the network. This network effect is one of the main reasons for Pinterest’s explosive growth over the past couple of months.

Pinterest made an interesting decision in requiring all users to connect to the website through either Facebook or Twitter. This mean that real names (usually) are tied to users; because of this, the quality of stuff that people share is generally high. Allowing everyone to hide behind fake identities would have resulted in a much different experience.

But the system wasn’t designed that way; it was designed so that people who post quality content (or at least content that others in their circle like) would become popular. Thus, rather than turning into a website full of animated GIFs and Web comics, the website has become a valuable resource to its community—mainly because it was designed to function that way.

Maybe It’s Not That Simple

I realize that simply saying that a product was designed to do what it is meant to do makes fixing problems seem like the easiest thing in the world. Of course, as you dig deeper into how to improve a design, you will have more variables to keep in mind; but always be aware of the simple fact that people will do what the design of a website lets them do.

Why did Twitter evolve beyond being a place where people just leave status updates? Part of it has to do with the tiny microcopy that was above the status update field. Originally it said “What are you doing?” and this of course led to people talking about their breakfast. After some time they changed it to “What’s happening?” which helped guide the people using the service to post about what is happening around them.

Why was Digg being gamed for so long? Because the design encouraged it. Simple. Executives at Yahoo might sit around a table asking why users aren’t using its search engine? Does the design of the website look like it is meant for search or even encourage it? Do you think Google execs sit around a table asking why people don’t use its search engine when they hit its main page? The design of Pinterest encourages users to continually scroll down the page looking at more and more pins; it is designed to keep you on the website.

Do you want your users to do something specific? Then design your website so that they do it.

It could be the greatest thing in the world, but what if you really designed something to chase people away or looking at it another way: What if you have designed it so there is no incentive to stay?

© Paul Scrivens for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice.

“People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.”

Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you, when in reality humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate. Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision. Politicians are rarely elected based on the majority of people doing research on their background and the policies they support. They are elected for the fact that people can relate to the message they are spreading and because we have heard of them before.

When it comes to our own designs, we imagine people being able to make informed decisions on what the next step should be. However, they are already making 400+ decisions throughout the rest of the day that are likely more important than what they will deal with in our design.

Do you think most people realize there are benefits to driving a manual transmission car over an automatic? Do you think they care? Automatic is easier to pick up so why bother with any other choice? How often do we stay in relationships that we shouldn’t, simply because it’s easier to just deal with it than face the repercussions of having to confront the person?

Have you ever been to In ‘N Out Burger? I’ve heard great stories about this place and their mythical burgers and fries. The catch behind this place is that they have a very limited menu. You order a Double Double, cheeseburger or hamburger. You can add fries, milkshake and beverage to that if you wish. That’s all of your options (unless you know about the secret menu). Now, I’ve been there and tasted their food and it’s good, but it is not much different than Wendy’s. The appeal of the place is that your choices are limited. It’s easy to order there because you don’t have to decide which type of chicken sandwich you feel is the best option for you. In ‘N Out makes the fast food experience easy for you. Having it your way is not the way we want.

In ‘N Out is known for their very limited menu. Too many choices are distracting and require more time for making a final decision what to order. Image source

Woot.com is an online store with a twist. Instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of items, you are offered only one item a day. If you like it, you buy it and if you don’t, you wait until tomorrow to see what is going to show up. The site is successful and yet the logic of it all seems backwards. However, if I’m running a store, does it really matter whether I’m selling 100 units of 1 item or 100 different items for 1 unit at a time? Woot makes the shopping experience easy by making our choice simply “yes” or “no”.

How much less fun would Angry Birds be if you had to select the birds you could use before each level? Taking away that choice and letting us focus on how to use the birds we are given makes the game much more enjoyable.

By not choosing which bird to play with in each level, one can focus more on how to use them. Image source

How many of your friends choose to buy a computer for their home simply because they use the same one at work? Since they have been using it at work, it has become easy for them to use. Doesn’t mean it is the better computer  —  it is simply the one that is easiest for them. Our selections don’t have to be the best choices  —  they just have to be ones that we are okay with.

How often do you come across a site that offers you better features than their competitors, but they aren’t as easy to use. There is no reason to switch over to a service that is harder to use even if they have more features. If the features aren’t there to make my life easier then what good does the service do me?

Back when image hosting was cool, the sites that won were the ones that allowed you to upload an image without having to register or login. You simply uploaded your image and you were done. Imgur is a great example of this and has now become one of the most popular image hosting sites in the world. That doesn’t mean sites like Flickr couldn’t thrive  —  they just had to work much harder to achieve more users and show that going through the hassle of registering was indeed worth it.

User Settings And Choice

In a recent article, Jared Spool did a study that found that only 5% of users changed their default settings in MS Word. Being a computer nerd, this surprised me because I like to dive into the settings of all of my applications to see what I can tweak. The large majority of people don’t seem to want to tweak though  —  they just want to use the application:

“We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.”

It is great to provide the user with the ability to make changes, but settings aren’t a must-have feature. Building a great product that just works should be priority number one and once you begin to understand what settings might be tweaked, should you then start to think about adding a settings panel.

Users assume you are giving them the settings that are best for them right off the bat. If you aren’t, then they might view your product as a failure.

The Paradox Of Choice

The paradox of choice says that the more options available to an individual, the harder it becomes to make a selection. For example, if there are free samples of jam being given out at the store, you are more likely to get people to buy a jar of jam when only six selections are available as opposed to 24. More choices don’t make the selection process easier for people, but having no choices takes away some of the freedom they believe they have.

According to Barry Schwartz, it is much easier to find your pair of crocs if there are fewer color options available. Image source

When deciding on which of the new iPhones you should get, you can either get it in black or white and three different memory options. Add in multiple carriers though and the choice starts to become a little more complicated.

If a client tells you that you can do their design any way you choose, it is more difficult than having to do a design with constraints because your options are endless. We need constraints, limited choices, to be built into everything that we do. This makes decision making easier and the benefit of this is an easier design to use.

If somehow you can make the easiest product and the best product in the industry, you have yourself a winner. You have to consider how many choices we are given daily so it’s in your best interest to limit the ones your customers have to make because there is a good chance it isn’t the most important decision of the day for them.

What this means is that the design that is easiest to evaluate (less options to choose from) will win most of the time. Make your copy straight to the point. Don’t waste your time on graphics that don’t drive the point home. Funny t-shirts and bumper stickers are effective because they are easy to evaluate. I have a hard enough time picking my outfit in the morning  —  don’t make me try to decide which one of the 250 default avatars I should use.

What Do You Think?

This article is part of our Opinion Column section where we provide a platform for designers and developers to raise their voice and discuss their opinion with the community. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

(il)

© Paul Scrivens for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Have you ever had someone flirt with you and they did nothing but demean themselves the whole time? Did that make you attracted to them? Doubtful. Yet, this is how so many individuals seem to handle their business today.

With the advent of social media, the Web has been overflooded with individuals claiming that they are experts at everything. It has become so rampant that whenever I come to see someone label themselves as an expert, I immediately believe they are trying to pull a fast one on me. Unfortunately, many times these people get business because there are people out there who really do believe that they are experts.

How many great designers do you know out there who struggle to find clients, while the world’s worst Microsoft Frontpage jockey can’t keep client offers out of his inbox? I know some of you reading this are dying to get more clients or more users to the app you created. Obviously, to get more people you need to let more people know about you and that doesn’t happen unless you say something. Once you develop a big enough reputation, you can sit back and let others talk about you, but 98% of us aren’t at that point yet so we have only ourselves to depend on.

Being An Annoyance

The problem I find is that I don’t want to be annoying like the other people I see hawking their wares. You might have this problem as well. On Twitter, the world is informed of a new article on my Drawar blog once and that is it. On the very rare occasion I will send out another tweet hours or days later if a great discussion is happening, but beyond that I don’t want to bug my audience. I know people that have no problem promoting their articles once per hour. I don’t know how it works out for them, but I know it annoys me and if something annoys me, I try to avoid doing it myself and therein lies the problem.

When you are promoting your work it is hard to look at your acts of promotion from an outsider’s perspective. When you think you are being annoying, you might not even be registering as a blip on a person’s radar. You might not be promoting enough to get the attention of the masses and yet in your mind you feel as though the masses want to kill you for your own acts of survival. What happens if I am trying to promote an article at 10 a.m.? Does every one of my followers come across that tweet and then know to retweet it if they find it worthy? Probably not.

Be Proud

I believe we do design because we are proud of our work. We believe that we deserve a chance because we can offer the client a unique value. Internally, we believe in it and so that means externally we should show that we believe in it as well.

If you write or design, you must believe in what you do. If you don’t believe you have something to express, there are plenty of other jobs out there. If you believe in what you do, and if you’re doing it for real, you must find ways to let people know about it.

There is a difference between being arrogant about yourself as a person and being confident that your work has some value. The first is unattractive, the second is healthy and natural. Some people respond to the one as if it were the other. Don’t confuse them. Marketing is not bragging, and touting one’s wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler “fresh rolls” if he hopes to feed the townfolk.

— On Self-Promotion

Not too long ago, some fellow informed me that he was going to unfollow Drawar on Twitter due to my arrogance. I’m not sure if he meant me personally or the fact that every once in a while I like to proclaim how wonderful I believe the site is. Admittedly, it can come across as arrogant and can be a complete turn off for many people, but to me that is just the confidence I have in the work I am putting forth with Drawar.

You often see testimonials on product and service sites, but not design blogs and portfolios. Why is that? Compliments and praise might be the greatest self-promotion you could ever achieve. Keep track of it. Put it out there for everyone to see. If your clients aren’t saying great things about you then you know you are doing something wrong, but if they are then why shouldn’t your future potential clients know about them as well?

You can’t complain about your lack of business if you aren’t doing anything about it. If you are working hard to spread the word and it isn’t working then either you aren’t doing it right or your product simply isn’t up to par. Hopefully, people respect you enough to let you know when it is below average.

When I first started writing articles, I didn’t write them and send them off onto the Web hoping that someone would find them. I sent them to my friends and asked them to tweet it, while I did the same on my personal Twitter account. Although I still think my friends should be tweeting everything that I write, I only ask them to tweet about my articles from time to time. Once or twice I have sent my friends a tweet linking to my articles and they have been kind enough to tweet about them to their audience.

Image source

I have also sent emails to individuals that I felt would be interested in an article and sometimes it works — many times it doesn’t. I still don’t feel comfortable asking others to tweet my stuff, but sometimes if you don’t ask then they won’t do it. In a perfect world, everyone spreads the word when you write something wonderful, but it just doesn’t work that way. We all need a little nudge from time to time.

The point is that even though I am proud of everything I write and wish that I had the audience to not have to worry about self-promotion ever again, I am not there yet and therefore have to continue to work and spread the word. This also means that when I do something I have to make sure it is quality and worth a person’s time. When you get people to commit to checking your work out and they don’t find it at all rewarding, you are going to have a hard time getting them back.

Community Participation

Dribbble isn’t just a showcase of great design, it has become a portfolio site for many designers. A large number have gotten jobs simply because someone came across their work on the site. You might work hard to build out your own portfolio with your own URL, but if you can’t find a way to get people to it then you are stuck. Dribbble helps you reach an audience that you might not have reached before.

This also applies to other communities. Blogging can help get you in the search engines and one day someone might happen upon you and launch your career. That is how Zeldman found Jason Santa Maria:

A Google search on Illustrator and Web design led me to a post by a guy I’d never heard of. The post was enjoyably written and reflected a mature and coherent attitude not simply toward the technique it described, but to the practice of design itself. Yes, the blog itself was intriguingly and skillfully designed, and that certainly didn’t hurt. But what made me hire Jason was not the artistry of his website’s design nor the demonstration that he possessed the technical skill I sought, but the fact that he had an evolved point of view about Web design.

— One Blog Post Is Worth A Thousand Portfolio Pieces

Taking the time to share you knowledge with the community shows that you have an idea of what you are doing. When people start to understand the process you go through to design a website, it helps to build credibility in their minds. If people within the community start calling you an expert, how do you think that projects to potential clients? By no means should you attempt to write every single day (unless you really want to), but getting an article up once a month can go a long way in promoting yourself.

Image source

Another great vehicle for self-promotion is conference speaking. You might see the same people speaking at different conferences throughout the year, but that is because many times they make it aware to the conference organizers that they are available to speak. Conference organizers look at the speaking lineups of other conferences to get an idea of who their audience wants to see.

However, if they don’t know you are willing to speak then why should they take the initiative to ask? Don’t hesitate to email conferences that interest you to let them know you are interesting in speaking for them.

Sharing Is Caring

While you should stand on top of the mountain and yell about your services every once in a while, the best method of promotion is to get involved. If you have a site, share your knowledge with the world. Visit other sites in the industry and comment. Make a name for yourself by being someone that is helpful. It’s no surprise that some of the best forms of promotion are giveaways.

If you follow Smashing Magazine on Twitter, you know that their feed is 95% links to other articles and resources. They play an enabler role of feeding traffic to the sites around them and in turn more and more people follow them. The greatest promotion Reddit ever did was to link out to the Web and not keep the stories to themselves.

If you are going to claim you don’t have time for this kind of stuff, well, then either you don’t have time to grow your business or your business is already at the point of saturation so life is good for you. I hope that you are at the latter stage, but many of you are still in the former.

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You must be careful when you reach a certain size though. Once your channel of sharing gets large enough there will be people out there that wish to exploit it. Maybe they want to fill it up with ads or you want to use it more for your own self-promotion. This is where the annoyance part kicks in and the reason your channel has been so effective in gaining an audience is because it was useful to them.

When you stop making it useful to them, then you lose them. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it for your own gain, but learn to find the balance because once they start to view you as nothing more than a marketing shill, you will find you have a hard time gaining their trust again.

In the end you will find that if you create something valuable for others, they will take over the marketing for you. I leave you with these two quotes:

“Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.”

— Edwin Land

“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”

— Milan Kundera

Related Posts

You might be interested in the following related posts:

• Web Designers, Get Out There and Make Something! by Michael Aleo
• I Want To Be A Web Designer When I Grow Up by Michael Aleo
• How To Become A Web Design Expert by Paul Boag

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© Paul Scrivens for Smashing Magazine, 2011.