flickr is a service for storing and sharing photos online. They offer a basic free service but also offer a ‘pro’ service for those that really want to use the service. And this button on the upgrade page really cannot be missed!
It’s huge and it has pink text. Lots of information to support the click: the price, the duration and a list of pro features. In fact the whole section from the headline ‘Holy Smokes…’ to the bottom of the features is one big link to the order page.
It does seem odd that they don’t provide a find out more link. Yes, this page is mainly linked from within flickr accounts. But still just because someone is signed up, doesn’t mean they understand the value of the pro features.
Tim Bednar of Turtle Interactive recently wrote an excellent post on the Art of the Sign Up Page. He came up with some good insights based on researching over twenty subscription-based, online productivity tools.
Read The Art of the Sign Up Page »
While we are slinging mud at others, we will admit we have our own faults! With that in mind, we will be rolling out some improvements to the blog and feed over the next week:
- Separate French and English Blogs.
- Separate French and English Feeds.
- Full articles on the Yclick.it homepage.
- Lightbox for viewing full screenshot.
Hopefully that will make for a better experience for everyone. If you have any thoughts on how we could make the blog better, please let us know!
Clickz is an excellent resource for internet marketers. It offers feeds for all its content to keep you up to date from the comfort of your feedreader. Yet, despite being subscribed to Clickz Experts for a year now, I rarely read it.
You see they only offer a partial feed - in this case a title and what could barely be called a summary. They publish a lot of articles, by a lot of different authors, on a lot of different subjects. It’s unlikely many readers are interested in all of them. But with so little information, it’s difficult for a reader to decide if something is worth reading in full.
I understand it suits some to provide partial feeds. But if you do, try and make them compelling. Write good titles. Spend some time on the summaries and make sure they are compelling. Consider is there any other information you can offer in the feed - like the post author or the post category. As as added bonus, both these examples can be links that draw the readers into your archives.
Problogger is running a good series on making your feeds pop!
Happy Cog is a highly respected web agency based in the States. Recently they redesigned their own site in order to better communicate their services overall. Unconventionally they have used a sentence as the basis of the site navigation.
Founder and author Jeffrey Zeldman writes that this approach emerged from thinking about the primacy of words in user interfaces. The sentence in large text quickly clarifies the many aspects of their business. The red underlined links ask to be clicked. I think it works well to draw visitors in.
Interestingly they have gone to great lengths to make it difficult to contact them. No call to action, no form, no email and no telephone number. Visitors have to download a word document, complete it, send it and wait up to two weeks for a response. Zeldman admits on his blog that this is how they filter potential clients.
Surely there is a better way?
Chris Garrett is a professional blogger who was previously involved in the high profile performancing.com. With an innovative strategy, he launched a new blog a week ago and already has more than 500 subscribers.
Chris is giving away an ebook on Killer Flagship Content. Promotions like this often involve the visitor subscribing to an email list. But Chris is launching a blog and wants people to subscribe to it. So he has come up with a novel way to make the ebook available to those that do subscribe.
Embedding a call to action in a feed is not a new thing. We’ve seen the social bookmarking, social media, advertisements and find out more about services links etc. But this is the first time I have seen a link to an ebook embedded in a feed, that is only available through the feed. A clever strategy indeed.
What else could you embed in your feed to reward subscribers?
(via Copyblogger)
Dave Shea is a freelance designer based in Canada. He is well known as the creator of the CSS Zen Garden which brilliantly demonstrated the power of Cascading Style Sheets for web design.
Today many authors are using internet strategies to promote their books and ideas. Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Krug to name just a few of the heavy hitters. Only yesterday I heard that Brian Clark of Copyblogger has been writing a book through his blog. As a loyal reader over the last year, I’m looking forward to that.
Dave Shea is an author too - he co-wrote the book ‘The Zen of CSS Design’. He promotes the book on his website. What I noticed is that he makes it easy for a visitor to buy the book in an online store local to them. Nine different stores in fact. Simple text links with the country code for each shop.
Mosso is a hosting service for people that build websites. There are quite a few nice features on this site including a live chat service.
Live chat is certainly taking off these days on commercial sites. It’s an excellent way to both answer and find out what questions your visitors have that have been left unanswered by your website.
On this site however, they have grouped together the live chat link and the telephone number. They’re both prominently displayed so that anyone scanning the page for a telephone number will find it and the live chat easily. A good way to maximise those questions.
I spoke about Last.fm recently. While I was signing up before I noticed something very interesting about the sign-up form. The terms and conditions comes pre-ticked.
I can see how this little tick really reduces friction in the sign-up process. I’m sure a large percentage of people would submit without ticking it and then have to be prompted to tick it.
But I wonder about the honesty of it. In fact I wonder about terms and conditions overall. They’re always unreadable legal mumbo jumbo. And if we are honest, we will probably admit few of us read them.
What do you think of terms and conditions? And do you think it’s a good idea pre-ticking them?
Skype is desktop software for making telephone calls through your computer. With more than 170,000 users, this software has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Must be lots to learn here!
But the homepage really doesn’t give a very clear idea what Skype is. They did have a compelling homepage but that’s been put aside as they roll out more and more services. On top of that, it takes at least three clicks to download the software.
It’s not all bad though. Right from the homepage, the site offers you a dowload for your specific operating system. We spoke about this already in relation to Firefox and Dropsend. But when you actually download the software, they also display specific instructions on how to install it on your platform.
An excellent idea for software aimed at a mainstream audience. In fact for any software company that wants major adoption of its downloadable software.
Have you come across anyone else doing this?
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A blog that looks at how websites are designed to persuade visitors to become customers. It's updated weekly with screenshots and thoughts on how language, colour, contrast, positioning all play their part in getting those all important clicks.
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