In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.) Read the rest of this entry »

“Is that Greek?”

Imagine you’re a client eagerly about to review Hile’s proposed design for a new website. You click on the link we’ve given you and there on your screen you see a mocked-up web page featuring clean, stylish design, a just-right photo for your banner image and … wait a minute. What the heck? In place of where the copy should go you see this:

Where you thought you’d see words somehow related to your company’s industry or purpose, there in its place is what appears to be a long, lost Romance language. You rack your brain trying to decipher what is now taking the place of the expected text. Of course, the words (if you can call them that) are there to show you how the page will look with copy and, unfortunately, hold as much meaning as a baby’s babble.

What Lorem Ipsum basically comes down to is designing and organizing a website, brochure, etc. that visually looks like the finished product. It doesn’t distract the viewer with actual copy, and the letters are spaced out well enough so that it appears on the page just as intelligible English would.  Read the rest of this entry »

Hile Design has been chosen to develop a new website for Ann Arbor-based software firm Llamasoft.

Llamasoft is a leading supply chain software firm and an active investor in technology development. Just in the past year, Llamasoft has doubled its workforce and expanded its client base to a global scale, taking on clients such as Ford, General Electric, Target and Intell. Llamasoft’s software enables clients to manage supply chain costs as a whole instead of in individual pieces.

Hile Design has been selected to design a new website for Ann Arbor, MI based Aastrom Biosciences.

Aastrom Biosciences, Inc. is the leading developer of patient-specific, expanded multicellular therapies for the treatment of severe, chronic cardiovascular diseases.

The company’s proprietary cell-processing technology enables the manufacture of ixmyelocel-T, a patient-specific multicellular therapy extracted from a patient’s own bone marrow and delivered directly to damaged tissues. Aastrom has advanced ixmyelocel-T into late-stage clinical development, including a planned Phase 3 clinical program to study patients with critical limb ischemia.

Hile Design has been hired to design a new website for Ann Arbor’s recently launched Vis-à-Vis Skin Spa & Bodywork.

Vis-à-Vis (meaning face to face in French) is an intimate boutique spa located within walking distance of downtown Ann Arbor, offering a full range of massages, facials, body treatments and products for purchase.

Your company’s website is the most fully-realized representation of your corporate brand. So the three questions you’ll need to answer on your website are: 1) Who are you? 2) What do you do? 3) And why does it matter? All our websites communicate our brand, whether that communication is undefined and accidental or focused and purposeful. Obviously we all want the latter. So, when it comes time to build or redesign your website consider the following:

• Branding is all about differentiation–standing out in the customer’s mind by offering something different than your competition. So, don’t get caught up in the “me too” mentality of listing the same services, and copying the look and feel of a competitor’s website. Actually, aim at the opposite. Different is good.

• Meet your customers where they live. Your customers are savvy and impatient, so do everything in your power to communicate with them and meet their needs on their own terms—not yours. Imagine they are sitting across the table from you. That means cutting out industry jargon and empty advertising “happy talk” from your website’s copy. Are they using social media? Then integrate it into your site. Are they accessing your website from a smart phone? Then make sure your site works flawlessly on hand-held devices.

• Capturing your culture is as important as marketing your goods and services. Your website is no longer just about pricing and offerings, because with so much competition out there, your customers can always find whatever they are looking for cheaper and faster. Today, people are looking for brands to identify with—so your corporate integrity and core values should ring out loud and clear. Blogs, which are generally more informal than the copy on the marketing section of your site, can go a long way to help round out your brand by providing your readers with a broader, more inclusive insight into who you are and what you stand for.

So as you busy yourself with figuring out your site map, search terms, navigation, categories, and all the other myriad considerations that go into building or updating your website, don’t overlook the forest for the trees. Make sure the true “you” (your brand) resonates loud and clear. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the decisions about whom we work and align ourselves with are determined by both our left and right brains—analytical and emotional.

Hile Design has been hired by Creative Automation to redesign their website. Headquartered in Ypsilanti, MI, Creative Automation provides complete automation systems across various industries. Rather than enduring the complicated process of buying and assembling various parts from numerous sources, Creative Automation will work with a client to design, build, and program the automation system. The end product is a fully assembled manufacturing machine that requires only the turn of a key to begin production, delivered right to the client.