BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to.

In this selection, we’re pleased to present Homestead, Bree Serif, Levanderia, Valencia, Nomed Font, Carton and other quality fonts. Please note that while most fonts are available for commercial projects, some are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such in their descriptions. Also, please read the licensing agreements carefully before using the fonts; they may change from time to time.

Free Fonts

Homestead
Homestead is a very distinctive Slab Serif typeface that leaves a lasting impression with its geometric forms and a modern, progressive look. The family is available in 6 weights: Regular, Inline Display, One, Two and Three. Released by the Lost Type foundry with the “name-your-price” pricing scheme. Homestead can be used freely for any personal or commercial use.

Bree Serif Regular
This typeface is the serif cousin of the playful, charming and versatile type family Bree which was designed by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione back in 2008. Actually, Bree is also the typeface used in the Smashing Cartoons. An italic font weight of Bree Serif should be available very soon. Released under the liberal OFL license (via Typografie.info).

Lavanderia
Lavanderia is a script font based on lettering found on Laundromat windows of San Francisco’s Mission District. It features numerous OpenType features such as swashes, titling alternates, figures, stylistic alternates, ligatures. It is available in three weights, with Uppercase, Lowercase, Numerals and Punctuation sets. Designed by the talented type designer James T. Edmondson and released by the Lost Type Co-Op foundry. Free for personal and commercial use.

RBNo2
This new gothic sans serif font was inspired by the late 19th century industrial fonts that contained german roots regarding straightness and geometry. Combined with other sans serifs, slab serifs and serif fonts, it catches the eye when used in headlines and short copy texts. Alternate versions turn the font into a perfect partner for modern, technical and contemporary impressions as well as high-quality, luxury and timeless environments. Free to use in commercial and non-commercial projects. Designed by Rene Bieder.

Cassannet
Cassannet is a geometrical art deco typeface available in Regular, Bold and Outline weights, based on lettering seen on Cassandre posters. This typeface contains ligatures, capitals, numbers, small capitals and also titling alternates. You can pay a random amount of money or alternatively send out a tweet or a Facebook post to download the fonts for free.

Valencia
Valencia is a condensed, art-deco inspired typeface that includes five weights, ranging from hairline to black, with matching obliques for each weight. The typeface has a nice corporate vintage look which makes it a great fit for large headlines and prints as well as any collateral or stationery. Valencia’s distinctive appearance stems from its low horizontal crossbars and its full-circle curves. Released by the Lost-Type Co-Op foundry with the “name-your-price” pricing scheme and hence freely available for personal and commercial use.

Jura
Jura is an elegant serif typeface with narrow proportions and distinguishing details. The rounded, wedge-shaped serifs offer a contemporary feel and also achieve to maintain legibility even with its range of small sizes. This typeface is available in four weights: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic and is available for free download and use.

Nomed Font
Nomed Font is a free typeface that can help you achieve a modern and sophisticated look in your designs. The triangular geometric shapes may be a bit hard to read but that’s exactly the highlight of this particular style, and it makes the typography unique and original.

Carton
This typeface, designed by Nick McCosker, is a strong yet sensitive slab-serif inspired by letterpress. Its sturdy appearance makes it a perfect fit for posters, headings and taglines, in both classic and contemporary contexts. Released by the Lost Type Co-Op under the “name-your-price” pricing scheme.

Novecento (Registration on MyFonts is required!)
This typeface is an uppercase-only font family with some pretty impressive geometric forms that have been inspired by historical European typographic tendencies. It was designed to be used mostly for headlines, visual identities or short sentences — both in big and small sizes. The family contains 471 glyphs and 32 font weights whereas six of the font weights of the wide-version (Light, Book, Normal, Medium, Demibold and Bold) are available for free download and use.

Fjord
Fjord is serif typeface that has specifically been designed for book publications. It is intended to be used in long texts and in relatively small print size. Fjord features sturdy construction, prominent serifs, low-contrast modulation and long elegant ascenders as well as descenders relative to the ‘x’ height. Fjord performs well in sizes starting from 12px and higher; nevertheless, it can also be a distinctive font choice for larger text headlines and in corporate design. This serif typeface include Cyrillic and Greek characters and is available at Google Web Fonts. It has been released under the SIL Open Font License, 1.1. Feel free to take a look at the designer’s free font Armata as well.

Hero
Hero is a crisp geometrical typeface applicable for any type of use: print, Web, logos, posters, booklets. This typeface contains 162 characters and is free for personal and commercial use. Available in the OpenType format for PC and Mac.

Otama e.p.
Here’s a quite confident typeface to use for expensive and fashionable designs. Strong steams and thin serifs shows similarities to the well-known traditional Didot typeface. This typeface is free for personal and commercial use.

Ribbon
This typeface is a geometric display face which includes OpenType features for an alternate alphabet. The family contains sets for Uppercase, Numerals and Punctuation. Released by the Lost Type Co-Op under the “name-your-price” pricing scheme and designed by Dan Gneiding. If you decide to buy the font for $30 or more, you will get a beautiful Ribbon Specimen Book as well.

Movavi
Movavi is a sans serif font that is available only in the font weights Black and Black Italic. Obviously, the typeface wouldn’t work for body copy, but it might work nicely in short headings or “groovy” art works. Available for free download and use on PC and Mac.

Satellite
Satellite is a geometric sans serif font designed by Matt Yow. The typeface can be a great fit for short headlines, short body copy or slogans. Released under the SIL Open Font License.

Open Sans
Open Sans is a very clean font family by Ascender Fonts. It includes ten styles (Light, Regular, Italic, Semibold, Bold, Bold Italic, Extrabold) and each one consists of more than 900 glyphs: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, many of the regular diacrytic letters as well as “hanging” numbers. Also available at Google Web Fonts and released under the Apache License version 2.

Mosaic Leaf
The glyphs of this expressive typeface are built out of leaves of different sizes. Mosaic Leaf also contains numbers, punctuation and currency symbols. The .zip-package contains PDF, OTF and TTF files; the fonts support Western and Central European encoding, and also Baltic, Nordic and Turkish. The typeface is free to use in commercial and non-commercial projects. Designed and prepared by Lukasz Kulakowski and Zbyszek Czapnik.

Amaranth
Amaranth is a sans serif font family of four basic styles (regular, italic, bold, bold italic) with individually shaped letter forms that makes typeface more playful. Suitable for both Web and print, longer texts and headings. Available at Google Web Fonts and licensed under the SIT OpenType License. Image credit and source: dersven.

Siruca Pictograms
A pictogram open source font made as a part of Siruca signage system designed by Fabrizio Schiavi. The font contains many picograms related to sport, signage, home, social meetings, free time activities and business.

Erler Dingbats
For the first time in the entire history of Unicode standard, the full encoding range for dingbats is now covered by a complete, contemporary quality font. FF Dingbats 2.0 features more than 800 glyphs and is mainly a tool for professional designers and has been created for everyday communication purposes. It includes a wide range of popular symbols and pictograms such as arrows, pens, phones, stars, crosses and checkmarks, plus three sets of cameo figures on round backgrounds. Free of charge. (via fontblog)

Further Free Fonts

SD Sansimillia
SD Sansimillia is a playful, yet elegant typeface suitable for many different applications. Originally cut for a local advertising brand, SD Sansimillia is inspired by the Antenna Family built by Cyrus Highsmith in 2007 as well as Erik Spiekermann’s FF Din Family cut in 1994. It is issued in regular, bold and black weights.

Mimic Roman
Mimic Roman is a modern sans serif face with evenly balanced strokes and a counter on a slight angle, giving it a 1950s retro look.

Roboto
Roboto Family is a linear sans serif font, available in 8 different styles of which each includes more than 900 glyphs — Greek and Cyrillic, too. This font was designed by Google for Andorid and is licensed under the Google Android License.

Mate
An elegant serif font designed by Eduardo Tunni. This typeface was primarily designed to be used in longer body copies in printed material. It is simple in structure and has sharp as well as generous counter-shapes which create a medium texture that calls for page color. It can also be used as display typography and is available at Google Web Fonts.

Last Click

Shape Type
If you are passionate about typography and have fun experimenting with glyphs, then you will certainly like the rather unusual type-design game created by the interaction designer Mark MacKay. The idea of this JavaScript-based letter-shaping game is simple: you get 10 modified letters from various classic typefaces, and you have to try to make them right by dragging curves along their axes. It’s an engaging way to explore what makes or breaks a glyph.

Font-Bot Project
It is time for your favorite font to stand its ground. The idea is to build robots out of a type face, showcase them and hope others put together a potential opponent. Once there are two font-bots ready to compete against each other, only thing left would be to “let the battle begin!” Participating is not hard, the rules are clear: all robots must be built of type alone (letters A to Z). Let’s see if your font has what it takes to defend its corner. Fight!

Further Resources

• Lost Type Co-Op
  The Lost Type Co-Op is a Pay-What-You-Want Type foundry. Users have the opportunity to pay whatever they like for a font; you can type in ‘$0′ for a free download. 100% of all funds from these sales go directly to the designers of the fonts themselves, respectively.
• The League of Moveable Type
  The open-source type movement for bringing high-quality tyepfaces to the Web. The creators of the project keep releasing quality fonts every now and then so be sure to stay tuned!
• Google Web Fonts
  A growing directory of hundreds of free, open-source fonts optimized for the Web. Google also provides ready-to-use snippets for integrating the fonts to your website.
• Typography and Free Fonts on Smashing Magazine
  An overview of typography-related articles and free font round-ups on Smashing Magazine.

We sincerely appreciate the time and effort of all type designers featured in this post. Please keep in mind that type design is a time-consuming craft which truly deserves reward and support. Please consider supporting type designers who create and release amazing typefaces for all of us to use.

(vf) (il)

© Smashing Editorial Team for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Back in 2009, the WebKit development team proposed a new extension to CSS that would allow Web page elements to be displayed and transformed on a three-dimensional plane. This proposal was called 3-D Transforms, and it was soon implemented in Safari for Mac and iOS. About a year later, support followed for Chrome, and early in 2011, for Android. Outside of WebKit, however, none of the other browser makers seemed to show much enthusiasm for it, so it’s remained a fairly niche and underused feature.

That’s set to change, though, as the Firefox and Internet Explorer teams have decided to join the party by implementing 3-D Transforms in pre-release versions of their browsers. So, if all goes according to plan, we’ll see them in IE 10 and a near-future version of Firefox (possibly 10 or 11, but that’s not confirmed yet), both of which are slated for release sometime this year.

That being the case, this is an ideal time to get ahead of the curve and start learning about the possibilities and potential of adding an extra dimension to your Web pages. This article aims to help you do just that, by taking you on a flying tour of the 3-D Transforms syntax.

Please bear in mind that in order to see the examples in this article, you’ll need a browser that supports 3-D Transforms; as I write this, that’s Safari, Chrome, IE 10 Platform Preview or Firefox Aurora.

The Third Dimension

On the Web, we’re accustomed to working in two dimensions: all elements have width and height, and we move them around the screen horizontally (left to right) and vertically (top to bottom). The move to a third dimension can be thought of as adding depth to elements, and adding movement towards and away from you (the viewer). Think about 3-D films in which objects are constantly thrust out of the screen towards you in an attempt to demonstrate the possibilities of the extra depth.

To use 3-D Transforms in CSS, you’ll need to know about axes (that’s the plural of axis, not the plural of axe). If you already know about working in three dimensions or remember using axes in math class at school, you can skip the next section. For everyone else, here is…

A Quick Primer On Axes

I just mentioned that on the 2-D Web, we move elements around horizontally and vertically. Each of these directions is called an axis: the horizontal line is known as the x-axis, and the vertical line is the y-axis. If we think of the top-left corner of an element as our origin (i.e. the point from which movement is measured), a movement to the left is a negative movement along the x-axis, and a move to the right is a positive movement along the x-axis. The same goes for moving an element up (negative on the y-axis) and down (positive on the y-axis).

The third dimension is known as the z-axis and, as I said, can be thought of as towards or away from you; a negative movement along the z-axis is away from you, and a positive movement is towards you.

Showing the three axes: x (left-right), y (up-down) and z (away-towards).

If you’ve read all of this talk of axes and negative movements and you’re rubbing your eyes and blinking in disbelief and misunderstanding, don’t worry: it will all become clear when you get stuck in the code. Come back and read this again after a few examples and it should all be clear.

Transformation Functions

The various transformations are all applied with a single CSS property: transform — yes, the same property that’s used for 2-D CSS Transforms. At the moment, this property is still considered experimental, so remember to use all of the browser prefixes, like so:

div {
  -moz-transform: foo;
  -ms-transform: foo;
  -o-transform: foo;
  -webkit-transform: foo;
}

Note that Opera doesn’t currently have an implementation of 3-D Transforms, but I’m including it here because work is apparently underway. For the sake of clarity, in the examples throughout this article, I’ll use only non-prefixed properties, but remember to include all of the prefixed ones in your own code.

Anyway, the transform property accepts a range of functions as values, each of which applies a different transformation. If you’ve used 2-D CSS Transforms, then you’ll already know many of these functions because they are quite similar (or, in some cases, the same). Here are all of the 3-D functions:

• matrix3d
• perspective
• rotateX, rotateY, rotateZ, rotate3d
• scaleX, scaleY, scaleZ, scale3d
• translateX, translateY, translateZ, translate3d

Now, matrix3d definitely sounds the coolest, but it’s so unbelievably complex (it takes 16 values!) that there’s no way I could cover it in this article. So, let’s put that aside and take a quick look at the others.

Rotation

To explain what this does, I’ll have to ask you to do a little mental exercise (which will come in useful later in the article, too). Imagine a sheet of card with a string running through the middle that fixes it in place. By taking the top corners in your fingers, you can move the card up and down, left and right, and forwards and backwards, pivoting around the string. This is what the rotate() function does. The individual functions rotateX(), rotateY() and rotateZ() take a deg (i.e. degree) value and move the element around its point of origin (where the string passes through it) by that much.

Have a look at our first example (a screenshot is shown below in case you don’t have access to a supported browser). Here we’ve rotated each of the elements 45° around a different axis (in order: x, y, z), so you can see the effect of each. The semi-translucent red box shows the original position of the element, and if you mouse over each, you’ll see the transformations removed (I’ve used this convention in all of the examples in this article).

Each element is rotated 45° around a different axis: x (left), y (center) and z (right).

There is a rotate3d() function as well, but it’s too complex to explain in a brief article like this one, so we’ll skip it.

Translation

This is really just a fancy way of saying “movement.â€� The functions translateX(), translateY() and translateZ() each take a length value, which moves the element by that distance along the given axis. So, translateX(2em) would move the element 2 ems to the right, and translateZ(-10px) would move the element 10 pixels away from the viewer. There’s also a shorthand function, translate3d(), which takes three values in order, one for each axis, like so: translate3d(x, y, z).

In our second example, we’ve translated each of the elements by -20 pixels along a different axis (in order: x, y, z).

Each element is translated by -20 pixels along a different axis: x (left), y (center) and z (right).

Note that translation of an element is similar to relative positioning, in that it doesn’t affect the document’s flow. The translated element will keep its position in the flow and will only appear to have moved, meaning it might cover or show through surrounding elements.

Scaling

This just means making bigger or smaller. The three functions scaleX(), scaleY() and scaleZ() each take a unitless number value, which is used as a multiplier. For scaleX() and scaleY(), this is applied directly to the width and height; for example, applying scaleY(1.5) to an element with a height of 100 pixels would transform it to 150 pixels high, and applying scaleX(0.75) to an element with a width of 100 pixels would transform it to 75 pixels wide.

The scaleZ() function behaves slightly differently. Transformed elements don’t actually have any depth to increase or decrease; what we’re doing is more like moving a 2-D object around in 3-D space. Instead, the value given to scaleZ() acts as a multiplier for the translateZ() function that I explained in the last section. So, applying both translateZ(10px) and scaleZ(2) would translate an element 20 pixels along the z-axis.

There’s also a shorthand property, scale3d(), which, like translate3d(), takes three values, one for each of the individual functions: scale3d(x,y,z). So, in the following code example, the same transformation applies to both of the elements:

.e1 {
   transform: scaleX(1.5) scaleY(1.5) scaleZ(0.75);
}

.e2 {
   transform: scale3d(1.5,1.5,0.75);
}

Perspective

The perspective() function is quite simple, but what it actually does is quite complex. The function takes a single value, which is a whole number greater than 0 (zero). Explaining this is a little complicated; the number is like a distance between you and the object that you’re viewing (a tutorial on Eleqtriq has a more technical explanation and diagram). For our purposes, you just need to know that the lower the number, the more extreme the 3-D effect will appear; any value below 200 will make the transformation appear very exaggerated, and any value of 1000 or more will seem to have no effect at all.

In our third example, we have three transformed elements, each with a different value for the perspective() function: 25, 50 and 200, respectively. Although the difference between the three is very discernible, it’s even clearer when you mouse over to see the transformations removed.

Each element has a different value for the perspective() function: 25 (left), 50 (center) and 200 (right).

Note that I’ve transformed the parent elements (equally) so that we can see the degree of perspective more clearly; sometimes the difference in perspective values can be imperceptible.

Other Properties

In addition to Transform, you’ll need to know about a few other important properties.

transform-style

If you’ll be applying 3-D transformations to the children of an already transformed element, then you’ll need to use this property with the value preserve-3d (the alternative, and default, is flat). This means that the child elements will appear on their own planes; without it, they would appear flat in front of their parent.

Our fourth example clearly illustrates the difference; the element on the left has the flat value, and on the right, preserve-3d.

The element on the left has a transform-style value of flat, and the one on the right has a value of preserve-3d.

Something else to note is that if you are transforming child elements, the parent must not have an overflow value of hidden; this would also force the children into appearing on the same plane.

transform-origin

As mentioned, when you apply a transformation to an element, the change is applied around a point directly in the horizontal and vertical middle — like the imaginary piece of string we saw in the earlier illustration. Using transform-origin, you can change this to any point in the element. Acceptable values are pairs of lengths, percentages or positional keywords (top, right, etc.). For example:

div {
   transform-origin: right top;
}

In our fifth example, you can see the same transformations applied to two elements, each of which has a different transform-origin value.

The element on the left has a transform-origin value of center center, and the one on the right has a value of right top.

The difference is clearly visible, but even more obvious if you pass the mouse over to see the transformation removed.

backface-visibility

Depending on which transformation functions you apply, sometimes you will move an element around until its front (or “faceâ€�) is angled away from you. When this happens, the default behavior is for the element to be shown in reverse; but if you use backface-visibility with a value of hidden, you’ll see nothing instead, not even a background color.

perspective and perspective-origin

We introduced the perspective() function earlier, but the perspective property takes the same values; the difference is that the property applies only to the children of the element that it’s used on, not the element itself.

The perspective-origin property changes the angle from which you view the element that’s being transformed. Like transform-origin, it accepts lengths, percentages or positional keywords, and the default position is the horizontal and vertical middle. The effect of changing the origin will be more pronounced the lower the perspective value is.

Conclusion

By necessity, we’ve flown through the intricacies of the 3-D transformations syntax, but hopefully I’ve whetted your appetite to try it out yourself. With a certain amount of care for older browser versions, you can implement these properties in your own designs right now. If you don’t believe me, compare the list of “More adventures� on The Feed website that I built last year in a browser that supports 3-D transforms and in one that doesn’t, and you’ll see what I mean.

Some of the concepts used in 3-D transforms can be quite daunting, but experimentation will soon make them clear to you in practice, so get ahold of a browser that supports them and start making some cool stuff. But please, be responsible: not everything on the Web needs to be in three dimensions!

Further Reading and Resources

• The Bright (Near) Future of CSS
  Eric Meyer’s comprehensive article on CSS3, covering CSS3 3D Transforms as well.
• 3D Transforms, Westciv
  This tool lets you play around with different transformation values and shows you the result in real time.
• “CSS3 3D Transforms,â€� W3C
  The CSS 3D Transforms module is the full specification, although it is very dry and technical.
• “20 Stunning Examples of CSS 3D Transforms,â€� Paul Hayes
  See what you can build when you master 3-D Transforms.
• The Book of CSS3, Peter Gasston
  My book contains much more detail about all of the functions that I’ve covered in this article, as well as the ones I had to leave out.

(al)

© Peter Gasston for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

WordPress 3 introduced custom taxonomies as a core feature. The following release of 3.1 included many features to enhance support of custom taxonomies. Better import and export handling, advanced queries with tax_query, hierarchical support, body classes and a bunch of wonderful functions to play with were all part of the package.

Let’s take an in-depth look at how to create your own custom taxonomies in WordPress, including a few advanced development examples that you can begin using in your WordPress themes and plugins today.

Taxonomies In WordPress

WordPress’ custom taxonomies make it possible to structure large amounts of content in a logical, well-organized way. In WordPress, categories are set up as a hierarchal taxonomy, and tags are set up as a multifaceted taxonomy.

Taxonomy content can be displayed in a theme using taxonomy templates. Within a template, there are ample ways to display your data with built-in taxonomy functions.

Built-In Taxonomies

WordPress offers four built-in taxonomies out of the box:

1. Categories (hierarchal),
2. Tags (multifaceted),
3. Links (multifaceted),
4. Navigation menu (hierarchal).

Custom Taxonomies

WordPress provides a new method of grouping content by allowing you to create your own custom taxonomies. The core developers have created the register_taxonomy() function to handle the heavy lifting for us. All you have to do is understand how to configure all of the settings to suit your needs.

A Practical Example: Content By Location

A business that operates in multiple locations could benefit from organizing its content by location to allow visitors to browse news in their locality. A large news organization could organize its content by world region (Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, US & Canada), as the BBC does in its “World� section.

Create a Custom Taxonomy

In WordPress, you can create (or “registerâ€�) a new taxonomy by using the register_taxonomy() function. Each taxonomy option is documented in detail in the WordPress Codex.

/**
 * Add custom taxonomies
 *
 * Additional custom taxonomies can be defined here
 * http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_taxonomy
 */
function add_custom_taxonomies() {
	// Add new "Locations" taxonomy to Posts
	register_taxonomy('location', 'post', array(
		// Hierarchical taxonomy (like categories)
		'hierarchical' => true,
		// This array of options controls the labels displayed in the WordPress Admin UI
		'labels' => array(
			'name' => _x( 'Locations', 'taxonomy general name' ),
			'singular_name' => _x( 'Location', 'taxonomy singular name' ),
			'search_items' =>  __( 'Search Locations' ),
			'all_items' => __( 'All Locations' ),
			'parent_item' => __( 'Parent Location' ),
			'parent_item_colon' => __( 'Parent Location:' ),
			'edit_item' => __( 'Edit Location' ),
			'update_item' => __( 'Update Location' ),
			'add_new_item' => __( 'Add New Location' ),
			'new_item_name' => __( 'New Location Name' ),
			'menu_name' => __( 'Locations' ),
		),
		// Control the slugs used for this taxonomy
		'rewrite' => array(
			'slug' => 'locations', // This controls the base slug that will display before each term
			'with_front' => false, // Don't display the category base before "/locations/"
			'hierarchical' => true // This will allow URL's like "/locations/boston/cambridge/"
		),
	));
}
add_action( 'init', 'add_custom_taxonomies', 0 );

After adding this to your theme’s functions.php file, you should see a new taxonomy under the “Postsâ€� menu in the admin sidebar. It works just like categories but is separate and independent.

After adding a few terms to your new taxonomy, you can begin to organize the content in your posts by location. A new “Locations� box will appear to the right of your posts in the WordPress admin area. Use this the way you would categories.

Let’s use this “location� taxonomy as a jumping-off point to learn more about working with taxonomy functions and content.

Create a Taxonomy Template for Your Theme

When you add a custom taxonomy to a WordPress theme, you can display its content using one of WordPress’ taxonomy theme templates.

• taxonomy-{taxonomy}-{slug}.php
  We could use this to create a theme template for a particular location, such as taxonomy-location-boston.php for the term “boston.â€�
• taxonomy-{taxonomy}.php
  If the taxonomy were location, WordPress would look for taxonomy-location.php.
• taxonomy.php
  This template is used for all custom taxonomies.
• archive.php
  If no taxonomy-specific template is found, then the taxonomy that lists pages will use the archive template.
• index.php
  If no other template is found, then this will be used.

Let’s use taxonomy-location.php to display our content. The template file could look something like this:

<?php
/**
 * Locations taxonomy archive
 */
get_header();
$term = get_term_by( 'slug', get_query_var( 'term' ), get_query_var( 'taxonomy' ) );
?>
<div class="wrapper">
	<div class="primary-content">
		<h1 class="archive-title"><?php echo apply_filters( 'the_title', $term->name ); ?> News</h1>

		<?php if ( !empty( $term->description ) ): ?>
		<div class="archive-description">
			<?php echo esc_html($term->description); ?>
		</div>
		<?php endif; ?>

		<?php if ( have_posts() ): while ( have_posts() ): the_post(); ?>

		<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class('post clearfix'); ?>>
			<h2 class="post-title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
			<div class="content clearfix">
				<div class="post-info">
					<p><?php the_time(get_option('date_format')); ?> by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></p>
				</div><!--// end .post-info -->
				<div class="entry">
					<?php the_content( __('Full story…') ); ?>
				</div>
			</div>
		</div><!--// end #post-XX -->

		<?php endwhile; ?>

		<div class="navigation clearfix">
			<div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('« Previous Entries') ?></div>
			<div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Next Entries »') ?></div>
		</div>

		<?php else: ?>

		<h2 class="post-title">No News in <?php echo apply_filters( 'the_title', $term->name ); ?></h2>
		<div class="content clearfix">
			<div class="entry">
				<p>It seems there isn't anything happening in <strong><?php echo apply_filters( 'the_title', $term->name ); ?></strong> right now. Check back later, something is bound to happen soon.</p>
			</div>
		</div>

		<?php endif; ?>
	</div><!--// end .primary-content -->

	<div class="secondary-content">
		<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
	</div><!--// end .secondary-content -->

<?php get_footer(); ?>

(Normally, we would load a template part for the loop, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ve skipped that step. As an alternative to get_term_by(), we could use single_term_title() and term_description() on this taxonomy archive template to display or retrieve the title and description of the taxonomy term.)

In this example, we’ve used a function called get_term_by() to retrieve all of the data associated with a taxonomy term in the form of an object. The object returned by the get_term_by() function contains the following details about the term:

• ID
  325
• name
  Boston
• slug
  boston
• group
  0
• taxonomy
  location
• taxonomy ID
  325
• description
  If you need to know the latest news in Boston, then look no further.
• parent
  0 (or the ID)
• count
  1 (i.e. the number of posts with this term selected)

We’ve used this object, then, to display information about the current term name and description in the taxonomy-location.php template.

Using Taxonomy Conditionals

Conditional tags can be used in WordPress to determine what content is displayed on a particular page depending on the conditions met by the page. Taxonomy templates have their own set of conditionals:

• is_tax()
  When any taxonomy archive page is being displayed.
• is_tax( 'location' )
  When a taxonomy archive page for the “location� taxonomy is being displayed.
• is_tax( 'location', 'boston')
  When the archive page for the “location� taxonomy with the slug of “boston� is being displayed.
• is_tax( 'location', array( 'boston', 'new-york', 'philadelphia' ) )
  Returns true when the “locationâ€� taxonomy archive being displayed has a slug of either “boston,â€� “new-yorkâ€� or “philadelphia.â€�
• taxonomy_exists()
  When a particular taxonomy is registered via register_taxonomy().

Working With Taxonomy Functions

Many functions for working with taxonomies are available in WordPress. Let’s go through a few commons examples of how to use them in practice.

Display a List of Taxonomy Terms

Most navigation systems begin with an unordered list. You can generate an unordered list of links to taxonomy archive pages using the wp_list_categories() function. This function is very customizable and can handle most of the scenarios that you’ll encounter as a theme developer.

/**
 * Create an unordered list of links to active location archives
 */
$locations_list = wp_list_categories( array(
  'taxonomy' => 'location',
  'orderby' => 'name',
  'show_count' => 0,
  'pad_counts' => 0,
  'hierarchical' => 1,
  'echo' => 0,
  'title_li' => 'Locations'
) );

// Make sure there are terms with articles
if ( $locations_list )
	echo '<ul class="locations-list">' . $locations_list . '</ul>';

If you encounter a situation that requires a custom structure, I would recommend exploring the Walker class or the wp_get_object_terms() function.

Create a Taxonomy Tag Cloud

A tag cloud provides a great way for users to browse content. The wp_tag_cloud() function makes creating a tag cloud with a custom taxonomy easy.

Let’s use it to display a tag cloud of our location terms:

// Locations tag cloud
<?php
$locations_cloud = wp_tag_cloud( array(
	'taxonomy' => 'location',
	'echo' => 0
) );

// Make sure there are terms with articles
if ( $locations_cloud ): ?>
<h2>News by Location</h2>
<div class="locations-cloud">
	<?php echo $locations_cloud; ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

Get All Terms in a Taxonomy

You will often need to work with a full list of terms in a taxonomy, and the get_terms() function can be quite handy for this. Let’s use it to show off the number of locations to which we’re providing news:

<?php
// Get a list of all terms in a taxonomy
$terms = get_terms( "location", array(
	'hide_empty' => 0,
) );
$locations = array();
if ( count($terms) > 0 ):
	foreach ( $terms as $term )
		$locations[] = $term->name;

	$locations_str = implode(', ', $locations);
?>
<h2>Nationwide Coverage</h2>
<p>We cover stories around the country in places like <?php echo $locations_str; ?> and more. If we're not the best source for the latest news in your area, let us know!</p>
<?php endif; ?>

This will output the following HTML:

<h2>Nationwide Coverage</h2>
<p>We cover stories around the country in places like Boston, London, New York, San Francisco and more. If we're not the best source for the latest news in your area, let us know!</p>

This simple approach may not show it, but the get_terms() function is incredibly powerful. It allows you to get terms from multiple taxonomies at once by passing an array that contains the names of your taxonomies as the first parameter.

Working With WP_Query and tax_query

The WP_Query class enables you to create a custom loop. WordPress 3.1 introduced a new parameter for the class called tax_query, which allows you to display content from a taxonomy in many unique ways.

Let’s use it to create a list of the most recent news posts in Boston.

<?php
/**
 * Display a list of the most recent news in Boston
 *
 * @class WP_Query http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query
 */
$locations_query = new WP_Query( array(
	'post_type' => 'post',
	'posts_per_page' => 10,
	'tax_query' => array(
		array(
			'taxonomy' => 'location',
			'field' => 'slug',
			'terms' => 'boston'
		)
	)
) );
// Display the custom loop
if ( $locations_query->have_posts() ): ?>
<h2>Latest News in Boston</h2>
<ul class="postlist">
	<?php while ( $locations_query->have_posts() ) : $locations_query->the_post(); ?>
	<li><span class="date"><?php the_time(get_option('date_format')); ?></span> – <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
	<?php endwhile; wp_reset_postdata(); ?>
</ul><!--// end .postlist -->
<?php endif; ?>

We could easily make this set-up dynamic by using the get_term_by() or get_terms() functions that we discussed earlier.

Attaching Additional Data to a Taxonomy

Each taxonomy term has specific data associated with it. Out of the box, WordPress allows you to store the following information for each taxonomy term:

• Name,
• Slug,
• Parent,
• Description.

But what if you need to store more information, such as an image for the taxonomy term or a title and description for search engines, or maybe even attach the term to a particular author the way a traditional news column does? Since WordPress 2.9, developers have been able to attach additional meta data to posts, pages, custom post types, comments and users using the add_metadata(), update_metadata() and get_metadata() functions. But this does not include taxonomies such as tags and categories.

With the help of the Taxonomy Metadata plugin, we can attach meta data to taxonomy terms for both built-in and custom taxonomies. This enables us to create additional taxonomy fields that will be stored in a new taxonomymeta database table.

Note to Multisite developers: I’ve encountered issues using the Taxonomy Metadata plugin on a WordPress Multisite installation. Activating the plugin network-wide results in data not being saved. Instead, activate the plugin individually for each website, and it will work properly.

(Knowing the story behind this technique and what it might mean for future WordPress upgrades is important. Currently, there is a debate on the WordPress Trac project about the best method for this. The method I’ll show you is one suggested by various WordPress core developers. But I strongly urge you to review the Trac project and the Codex. A standard approach could very well be built into WordPress in the future, which would therefore be more practical than what I am about to show you.)

The prerequisite to all of the examples below is to install and activate the Taxonomy Metadata plugin.

Add Search Engine Title and Description Fields to Categories and Tags

We will use action hooks to gracefully attach additional fields to our taxonomies without editing WordPress’ core. If you’ve made it this far, then you probably have a working knowledge of WordPress filters and actions. To learn about working with hooks, I highly suggest Daniel Pataki’s article on the subject.

Let’s start by adding a text input and a textarea field to the “Add Newâ€� and “Editâ€� term pages on the WordPress admin screen. We do this by placing the following functions in our theme or plugin.

The taxonomy_metadata_add() function attaches the fields to the /wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=%taxonomy% page.
The %taxonomy% item in the URL above will change depending on the term you are editing.

/**
 * Add additional fields to the taxonomy add view
 * e.g. /wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category
 */
function taxonomy_metadata_add( $tag ) {
	// Only allow users with capability to publish content
	if ( current_user_can( 'publish_posts' ) ): ?>
	<div class="form-field">
		<label for="meta_title"><?php _e('Search Engine Title'); ?></label>
		<input name="meta_title" id="meta_title" type="text" value="" size="40" />
		<p class="description"><?php _e('Title display in search engines is limited to 70 chars'); ?></p>
	</div>

	<div class="form-field">
		<label for="meta_description"><?php _e('Search Engine Description'); ?></label>
		<textarea name="meta_description" id="meta_description" rows="5" cols="40"></textarea>
		<p class="description"><?php _e('The meta description will be limited to 156 chars by search engines.'); ?></p>
	</div>
	<?php endif;
}

The taxonomy_metadata_edit() function attaches the fields to the /wp-admin/edit-tags.php?action=edit&taxonomy=%taxonomy%&tag_ID=%id%&post_type=%post_type% page.
The %taxonomy%, %id% and %post_type% items in the URL above will change depending on the term you are editing.

We’ll use the get_metadata function here to display any saved data that exists in the form.

/**
 * Add additional fields to the taxonomy edit view
 * e.g. /wp-admin/edit-tags.php?action=edit&taxonomy=category&tag_ID=27&post_type=post
 */
function taxonomy_metadata_edit( $tag ) {
	// Only allow users with capability to publish content
	if ( current_user_can( 'publish_posts' ) ): ?>
	<tr class="form-field">
		<th scope="row" valign="top">
			<label for="meta_title"><?php _e('Search Engine Title'); ?></label>
		</th>
		<td>
			<input name="meta_title" id="meta_title" type="text" value="<?php echo get_term_meta($tag->term_id, 'meta_title', true); ?>" size="40" />
			<p class="description"><?php _e('Title display in search engines is limited to 70 chars'); ?></p>
		</td>
	</tr>

	<tr class="form-field">
		<th scope="row" valign="top">
			<label for="meta_description"><?php _e('Search Engine Description'); ?></label>
		</th>
		<td>
			<textarea name="meta_description" id="meta_description" rows="5" cols="40"><?php echo get_term_meta($tag->term_id, 'meta_description', true); ?></textarea>
			<p class="description"><?php _e('Title display in search engines is limited to 70 chars'); ?></p>
		</td>
	</tr>
	<?php endif;
}

These two functions control the output of the form fields. I’ve used HTML that follows WordPress’ UI patterns and styles guidelines for the admin area.

Saving the form’s data to the taxonomymeta database table
Now that we’ve added the form fields, we’ll need to process and save the data with the update_term_meta function that is provided by the plugin.

/**
 * Save taxonomy metadata
 *
 * Currently the Taxonomy Metadata plugin is needed to add a few features to the WordPress core
 * that allow us to store this information into a new database table
 *
 *	http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/taxonomy-metadata/
 */
function save_taxonomy_metadata( $term_id ) {
	if ( isset($_POST['meta_title']) )
		update_term_meta( $term_id, 'meta_title', esc_attr($_POST['meta_title']) );

	if ( isset($_POST['meta_description']) )
		update_term_meta( $term_id, 'meta_description', esc_attr($_POST['meta_description']) );
}

Add the new taxonomy fields
Now that everything is in place, we’ll use action hooks to load our new functions in all the right places. By hooking the following function into the admin_init action, we ensure that it runs only on the admin side of WordPress. First, we need to make sure that the functions added by the Taxonomy Metadata plugin are available. Next, we use the get_taxonomies() function to attach the new taxonomy fields to every public taxonomy, including the built-in tags and categories.

/**
 * Add additional taxonomy fields to all public taxonomies
 */
function taxonomy_metadata_init() {
	// Require the Taxonomy Metadata plugin
	if( !function_exists('update_term_meta') || !function_exists('get_term_meta') ) return false;

	// Get a list of all public custom taxonomies
	$taxonomies = get_taxonomies( array(
		'public'   => true,
		'_builtin' => true
	), 'names', 'and');

	// Attach additional fields onto all custom, public taxonomies
	if ( $taxonomies ) {
		foreach ( $taxonomies  as $taxonomy ) {
			// Add fields to "add" and "edit" term pages
			add_action("{$taxonomy}_add_form_fields", 'taxonomy_metadata_add', 10, 1);
			add_action("{$taxonomy}_edit_form_fields", 'taxonomy_metadata_edit', 10, 1);
			// Process and save the data
			add_action("created_{$taxonomy}", 'save_taxonomy_metadata', 10, 1);
			add_action("edited_{$taxonomy}", 'save_taxonomy_metadata', 10, 1);
		}
	}
}
add_action('admin_init', 'taxonomy_metadata_init');

That’s it. We’re done!

You should now see two additional fields in your tags, categories and public custom taxonomies. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, the technique can be used to handle many different scenarios. This basic framework for storing and retrieving information associated with a taxonomy should have you well on your way to mastering the management of taxonomy content.

In Conclusion

I hope you better understand how to organize WordPress content with the help of taxonomies. Whether hierarchal or multifaceted, a well-implemented taxonomy will simplify the way content is organized and displayed on a website. WordPress has all of the tools you need to create custom taxonomies and to group your content in new and exciting ways. How you use them is up to you!

Additional Resources

• Custom taxonomy theme templates in WordPress
• “Custom Taxonomies in WordPress 2.8â€�
• “A Refresher on Custom Taxonomiesâ€�
• Official documentation on register_taxonomy()
• “Introducing WordPress 3 Custom Taxonomiesâ€�
• “Adding Meta Data to Taxonomy Termsâ€�

(al)

© Kevin Leary for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.

Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Then we’ll look in depth at a common flow for e-commerce websites (the customer acquisition funnel), as well as provide tips on optimizing it to create a complete customer experience.

Start With The User

When starting a new Web design project, we’re often handed a design brief, branding standards, high-level project goals, as well as feature and functionality requirements. Unfortunately, these documents typically amount to little more than the technical specifications of the project, with almost no thought given to how exactly the website will fulfill the multiple user objectives that lead to successful interactions.

Two examples of popular user flows for e-commerce and subscription websites.

If you start with a detailed look at the objectives of the user and the business, you would be able to sketch out the various flows that need to be designed in order to achieve both parties’ goals. User objectives could range from finding a fact to replacing a product to learning a new skill to buying a gift for someone. Business objectives could be getting a lead, a like, a subscriber, a buyer, a download or a phone call. Identifying each user and business objective is the first step to creating design flows that meet all of them.

Map User Flows Into Conversion Funnels

Not all website visitors are created equal. Users come from different sources, with varying levels of knowledge and engagement, and with different goals. It’s up to you as a user experience designer to map those in-bound user flows to conversion funnels that provide value to the user as well as the business.

You should prioritize the flows and focus your effort on the few that will impact the most users and have the greatest gain. Custom flows allow you to architect experiences according to traffic source or visitor type and enable you to set the experiential pace, build user confidence and get buy-in on the way to the ultimate conversion.

Typical User Flows

Some typical user flows are:

• Paid advertising
  A user coming from a banner or Google AdWord ad.
• Social media
  A user coming from a friend’s post on a social network.
• Email
  A user coming from an email newsletter or referral invitation.
• Organic search
  A user coming from a deep link that was surfaced by a search.
• Press or news item
  A user coming from a mention in the news or a blog post.

Each of these visitors has their own needs, expectations and level of knowledge, and they need to be treated accordingly.

Diving Into Funnels: A Closer Look At Customer Acquisition

E-commerce websites typically have many different conversion funnels.

Let’s look at a critical flow for many websites — paid online customer acquisition — and break down its various elements. For this example, we’ll examine the experience flow from new visitor to email subscriber to purchaser.

Consider a company that uses display advertising to generate new customers for its business.

Display Media

With display advertising, it all starts with the banner. The design of the banner needs to achieve one precious goal: get a click from the right person. Here are some key questions to answer when designing the ads that represent the very front of your user flow:

• What type of user am I targeting?
• Are they actively seeking a solution to a problem, or are they casually browsing?
• What problem are they trying to solve?
• How can I best capture the user’s attention?
• How do I relate to the user?
• Is there a message that will resonate with the user?
• Is there a pain point that my product or website alleviates for the user?
• How can I articulate this solution clearly and quickly?
• What compelling calls to action will get our target user to click?

Your ads should address these main motivations and provide a compelling hook to get that all-important click. Up-front research and real-world testing will help to optimize the experience. Using this model, ReTargeter improved its banner click-through rate by four times. Its blog post lays out exactly how it achieved this success.

The Landing Page

The point when the user hits the landing page is when the user flow work really begins. Because these users are coming from a low-information source (such as a banner, as opposed to an in-depth blog post), you must design a flow that fills in the gaps of information by providing the user with the data that they need to be converted.

In our example, the user will hopefully be converted to an email subscriber; but depending on the business, the conversion could be to create an account, download a white paper or make a purchase. Whatever the conversion goal for the business, the key is to give the user a reason to keep moving through the flow, down the funnel.

Use the following methods to keep the user moving down the funnel:

• Build user confidence by clearly articulating key benefits, backed by easy-to-digest proof points.
• Streamline the content and design to focus on a clear call to action (in this example, to sign up for an email newsletter).
• Remove friction at every step. Ask for the minimum amount of information, and reduce the number of fields, extra clicks and page-loading time.
• Create an enticing hook, an itch that can only be scratched by completing the registration step.

KISSmetrics’ “Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page� details the design, UI and copy elements that can help you meet your users’ need and drive conversions for your business.

Stacking Flows For A Complete User Experience Life Cycle

While viewing a funnel as something like Click on banner ad → Land on Web page → Register email is easy, designing and building stacked flows that drive the business’ ultimate objectives takes a bit more thought. In our example, we’ve successfully gained an email subscriber from the banner ad campaign, but the real business objective is to generate revenue through new purchases.

Treating the email subscriber flow and the e-commerce purchasing flow as two separate conversion funnels is an easy trap. In reality, the experiences are connected, and by looking at them as stacked flows, we can create a more cohesive interaction, one that drives optimal results for the business.

In our example, this stack is made up of the customer acquisition funnel and the customer relationship management (CRM) flow.

Stacking funnels creates a cohesive user experience life cycle.

When designing this flow, you need to consider what the biggest levers are for converting the subscriber into a buyer. Many of the earlier principles apply, but this time you have more touch points to consider and leverage.

In this flow, you need to look at all elements of your CRM strategy and the purchase flow of your website, including:

• Email communication back to the subscriber,
• Pages that the subscriber lands on when returning to the website,
• The flow from internal content pages to check-out.

Here are a few key considerations when designing the flow from subscriber to purchaser:

• Tell a visual story that the subscriber can identify with and wants to be a part of.
• Ensure that your emails reinforce the story, and give proof points to remind users why they subscribed.
• Include compelling calls to action to give the subscriber an opportunity to relate to and be a part of the story.
• Include prominent calls to action and easy, direct paths to the check-out process from the website’s internal content pages and blog posts. These validate the user’s hope about their role in the story.
• Make the check-out process as frictionless as possible, and reinforce confidence along the way to help the buyer commit to being a part of it.

By considering how the two flows interact, you can create a seamless experience that builds confidence and deepens the user’s connection to your website, leading to the ultimate purchase conversion. Equally important, this flow also increases customer satisfaction because the stacked funnels keep the user experience smooth and on track to meeting their needs, with little confusion or ambiguity.

Putting Flow Design To Work For You

Whether you’re mapping out a brand new website or looking to optimize an existing user experience, flow design will keep you out of the trap of designing individual pages and interactions and instead focus you on fulfilling users’ needs. By prioritizing your user flows and focusing on the ones that drive the most value to the most users and to the business, you can make the greatest impact with your initial flow design.

When considering user flows, think past the first conversion, and design for the ultimate conversion, which might lie a few steps behind. This is particularly important with any type of commerce-driven business, for which the first conversion is often just a prelude to the primary revenue event. By stacking these complementary funnels, you create a more cohesive user experience that drives better results for both the user and your business.

So, the next time you’re asked to create a new design, step back and ask yourself and your team what user flows you are trying to create through the website, and let that insight drive the design process.

(al)

© Morgan Brown for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.

Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Then we’ll look in depth at a common flow for e-commerce websites (the customer acquisition funnel), as well as provide tips on optimizing it to create a complete customer experience.

Start With The User

When starting a new Web design project, we’re often handed a design brief, branding standards, high-level project goals, as well as feature and functionality requirements. Unfortunately, these documents typically amount to little more than the technical specifications of the project, with almost no thought given to how exactly the website will fulfill the multiple user objectives that lead to successful interactions.

Two examples of popular user flows for e-commerce and subscription websites.

If you start with a detailed look at the objectives of the user and the business, you would be able to sketch out the various flows that need to be designed in order to achieve both parties’ goals. User objectives could range from finding a fact to replacing a product to learning a new skill to buying a gift for someone. Business objectives could be getting a lead, a like, a subscriber, a buyer, a download or a phone call. Identifying each user and business objective is the first step to creating design flows that meet all of them.

Map User Flows Into Conversion Funnels

Not all website visitors are created equal. Users come from different sources, with varying levels of knowledge and engagement, and with different goals. It’s up to you as a user experience designer to map those in-bound user flows to conversion funnels that provide value to the user as well as the business.

You should prioritize the flows and focus your effort on the few that will impact the most users and have the greatest gain. Custom flows allow you to architect experiences according to traffic source or visitor type and enable you to set the experiential pace, build user confidence and get buy-in on the way to the ultimate conversion.

Typical User Flows

Some typical user flows are:

• Paid advertising
  A user coming from a banner or Google AdWord ad.
• Social media
  A user coming from a friend’s post on a social network.
• Email
  A user coming from an email newsletter or referral invitation.
• Organic search
  A user coming from a deep link that was surfaced by a search.
• Press or news item
  A user coming from a mention in the news or a blog post.

Each of these visitors has their own needs, expectations and level of knowledge, and they need to be treated accordingly.

Diving Into Funnels: A Closer Look At Customer Acquisition

E-commerce websites typically have many different conversion funnels.

Let’s look at a critical flow for many websites — paid online customer acquisition — and break down its various elements. For this example, we’ll examine the experience flow from new visitor to email subscriber to purchaser.

Consider a company that uses display advertising to generate new customers for its business.

Display Media

With display advertising, it all starts with the banner. The design of the banner needs to achieve one precious goal: get a click from the right person. Here are some key questions to answer when designing the ads that represent the very front of your user flow:

• What type of user am I targeting?
• Are they actively seeking a solution to a problem, or are they casually browsing?
• What problem are they trying to solve?
• How can I best capture the user’s attention?
• How do I relate to the user?
• Is there a message that will resonate with the user?
• Is there a pain point that my product or website alleviates for the user?
• How can I articulate this solution clearly and quickly?
• What compelling calls to action will get our target user to click?

Your ads should address these main motivations and provide a compelling hook to get that all-important click. Up-front research and real-world testing will help to optimize the experience. Using this model, ReTargeter improved its banner click-through rate by four times. Its blog post lays out exactly how it achieved this success.

The Landing Page

The point when the user hits the landing page is when the user flow work really begins. Because these users are coming from a low-information source (such as a banner, as opposed to an in-depth blog post), you must design a flow that fills in the gaps of information by providing the user with the data that they need to be converted.

In our example, the user will hopefully be converted to an email subscriber; but depending on the business, the conversion could be to create an account, download a white paper or make a purchase. Whatever the conversion goal for the business, the key is to give the user a reason to keep moving through the flow, down the funnel.

Use the following methods to keep the user moving down the funnel:

• Build user confidence by clearly articulating key benefits, backed by easy-to-digest proof points.
• Streamline the content and design to focus on a clear call to action (in this example, to sign up for an email newsletter).
• Remove friction at every step. Ask for the minimum amount of information, and reduce the number of fields, extra clicks and page-loading time.
• Create an enticing hook, an itch that can only be scratched by completing the registration step.

KISSmetrics’ “Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page� details the design, UI and copy elements that can help you meet your users’ need and drive conversions for your business.

Stacking Flows For A Complete User Experience Life Cycle

While viewing a funnel as something like Click on banner ad → Land on Web page → Register email is easy, designing and building stacked flows that drive the business’ ultimate objectives takes a bit more thought. In our example, we’ve successfully gained an email subscriber from the banner ad campaign, but the real business objective is to generate revenue through new purchases.

Treating the email subscriber flow and the e-commerce purchasing flow as two separate conversion funnels is an easy trap. In reality, the experiences are connected, and by looking at them as stacked flows, we can create a more cohesive interaction, one that drives optimal results for the business.

In our example, this stack is made up of the customer acquisition funnel and the customer relationship management (CRM) flow.

Stacking funnels creates a cohesive user experience life cycle.

When designing this flow, you need to consider what the biggest levers are for converting the subscriber into a buyer. Many of the earlier principles apply, but this time you have more touch points to consider and leverage.

In this flow, you need to look at all elements of your CRM strategy and the purchase flow of your website, including:

• Email communication back to the subscriber,
• Pages that the subscriber lands on when returning to the website,
• The flow from internal content pages to check-out.

Here are a few key considerations when designing the flow from subscriber to purchaser:

• Tell a visual story that the subscriber can identify with and wants to be a part of.
• Ensure that your emails reinforce the story, and give proof points to remind users why they subscribed.
• Include compelling calls to action to give the subscriber an opportunity to relate to and be a part of the story.
• Include prominent calls to action and easy, direct paths to the check-out process from the website’s internal content pages and blog posts. These validate the user’s hope about their role in the story.
• Make the check-out process as frictionless as possible, and reinforce confidence along the way to help the buyer commit to being a part of it.

By considering how the two flows interact, you can create a seamless experience that builds confidence and deepens the user’s connection to your website, leading to the ultimate purchase conversion. Equally important, this flow also increases customer satisfaction because the stacked funnels keep the user experience smooth and on track to meeting their needs, with little confusion or ambiguity.

Putting Flow Design To Work For You

Whether you’re mapping out a brand new website or looking to optimize an existing user experience, flow design will keep you out of the trap of designing individual pages and interactions and instead focus you on fulfilling users’ needs. By prioritizing your user flows and focusing on the ones that drive the most value to the most users and to the business, you can make the greatest impact with your initial flow design.

When considering user flows, think past the first conversion, and design for the ultimate conversion, which might lie a few steps behind. This is particularly important with any type of commerce-driven business, for which the first conversion is often just a prelude to the primary revenue event. By stacking these complementary funnels, you create a more cohesive user experience that drives better results for both the user and your business.

So, the next time you’re asked to create a new design, step back and ask yourself and your team what user flows you are trying to create through the website, and let that insight drive the design process.

(al)

© Morgan Brown for Smashing Magazine, 2012.