Thanks to Eric for posting this video on his Digital Design Diary site.

Mo Serious brings us a seriously cool video about website design, coding and SEO principles, all set to rap music. Who would have thought? I’m in love with this guy - he’s a genius.

You find yourself at a website that looks interesting, but just not completely trustworthy. The website’s owner is offering you an enticing freebie - a special report that claims to contain the elusive solutions to your most painful problems.

But you’re worried about handing over your email address in order to get the download link. If you sign up for the freebie, by default you also end up subscribing to their mailing list. You already get enough spam, and who knows how much junk will flood your inbox if you enter your email address and click that shiny ‘Subscribe’ button?

The answer is to use a free throw-away email address from 10 Minute Mail. It’s your email inbox’s new best friend. The email address lasts only just long enough for you to get your download link. If you like the special report enough, you can would then feel safe enough to subscribe to the site’s eZine or RSS feed. If it’s a load of doggy poop, at least you haven’t sacrificed your inbox to the spam gods.

BUT…

What if you’re one of those website owners who use a downloadable freebie as an enticement to subscribe to your eZine? Isn’t the disposable email address your bitterest enemy? Are you hating me for recommending a service like 10 Minute Mail? Please don’t. I have some tips for you (and for myself, as I plan on doing exactly this).

1. Make sure your website projects a polished and professional image. Avoid the common web design mistakes. I’m thinking along the lines of multi-colored text, yellow highlighting, and lots of exclamation marks and gratuitous emphasis!!! But simple things like not using enough ‘white space’ in your layout - especially around the margins, choosing hard-to-read fonts, and cramping up the elements on your page also hurts. Look as professional and trustworthy online as you are in ‘real life’.
2. Under-promise and over-deliver. Avoid sounding too hyped-up and ‘too-good-to-be-true’ in your content. Be specific and truthful about what you have to offer.
3. Convince your visitors that your eZine is also a fantastic resource, not just a sacrifice they have to make to get your freebie. Your visitor should believe that signing up for the freebie plus the eZine is a double blessing (rather than dreading that the eZine is the ugly old chaperone that puts a real damper on your date with the drop-dead gorgeous super-model).
4. Include links to your website and to your eZine subscription form in your freebie. It should be a ’standalone’ marketing tool in its own right. Not only could your visitors use a service like 10 Minute Mail to avoid getting your eZine, but subscribers who really enjoyed the freebie might pass it around to their friends (that would be a great thing - it’s called ‘viral marketing’), and bypass the subscription process. You want to make it easy for them to get on your subscriber list now that they feel safe enough to do so.

I know of a success coach who tried to stop people from passing around his free eBooks because he wanted everyone to subscribe to his eZine first. He made a point of saying that if you shared the free eBooks with your friends, you were engaging in copyright violation and piracy.

I reckon he shot himself in the foot. Who wants to email their friends a link to a subscription form instead of just sending the PDF file? I’d feel embarrassed.

Encourage people to spread your freebies around - just make sure your freebie brings people to your site and persuade them that your eZine will be genuinely useful and interesting to them.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Since writing this post this morning, I’ve started watching an interesting marketing video on the subject of providing incentives. It has some surprising test results when comparing one test webpage with another.

photo credit: fazen

When Google first created its beta (first draft) home page and set up a test to see how well it would work, there was a problem.

“[Our beta testers] would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…Google was perplexed.”

Interested in what the problem was and how easily it was fixed? Read the article:

What You Never Noticed About Google

Read more . . .

Visitors to your website don’t come just to look at your design and to figure out how to get all your fancy special effects to work. They come with questions they want answered. Your job is to make that information that they seek as easy to find as possible. Anything that stands in the way of your visitor finding out what they want to know quickly and simply makes your website a nightmare to use.

Smashing Magazine has a list of 10 Usability Nightmares you should be aware of with examples from real sites. There is also a list of 8 usability checkpoints:

1. Don’t use pop-ups.
2. Don’t change users’ window size.
3. Don’t use too-small font sizes.
4. Don’t have unclear link text.
5. Don’t have dead links.
6. Have at most one animation per page.
7. Make it easy to contact you.
8. Make links open in the same window.

Do you agree with the article? Do you know of any other usability nightmares that they missed?

10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of ~ Smashing Magazine

On a side note, comment #142 for this article was very amusing:

“I think that every designer should design for their grandma. If she can get around the site, only then can you pat yourself on the back. I have had customers that when I said click on the link, they actually picked up the mouse, put it on the screen and then clicked.”

Oh, dear.

Here’s another website that really sucks. It’s completely unusable. Can you figure out what they sell? Or, like me, did you run away screaming first? Enter at your own risk: Crumpler USA.

(And unfortunately this site was designed by fellow Aussies, and their own site is pretty bad, too. I hate naming names, but these are classic examples of what NOT to do with your own website.

You may as well flush your business down the toilet…

photo credit: elisfanclub