Mozak Design Blog

Connecting with Your Customer

What will you say to them?

It is critical that you speak to your client on home page. It is not time to speak about how wonderful your business is. Instead identify what brought them to your wordpress website and how you will offer solutions.

How will you connect with your prospective client?

The best method involves offering a complimentary service that the client views as valuable. Options include: free phone consultations, providing a article or monthly newsletter full of tips in exchange for the customer leaving an e-mail address. This provides your client with a service in exchange for providing you with a method for future follow up. Even if the client is not ready to purchase from you at that moment you have a method for future connections.

How will you build credibility with them?

Once you engage your clients on the homepage, they will want to navigate deeper into your wordpress website. This is where you continue to grow credibility by showing all your business has to offer. You can include information on services, products, and links to related resources. Wordpress Blogs & articles are a great method for providing quality information to your clients. Coupons, hours and location serve clients planning to visit your physical store. All of these pieces are resources to your customers; resources that they will appreciate; resources that will take your business to the next level.

Robust CSS Website Design

I have seen numerous post by designers struggling to transition into the world of CSS from table based design. One book I have found extremely useful is “Bulletproof Web Design” by Dan Cederholm.

This is one of the first books I picked up when I was learning and one I still grab every now and then. It is readable, clear, and thorough.

Topics covered by this book include: Flexible Text, Scalable Navigation, Elastic & Fluid Layouts, and Creating Floats.

While each of these topics warrants it’s own blog (and hence its own chapter in the book) I want to highlight how each topic makes for a high quality final web design.

Flexible Text:

• This is the concept of using relative font sizing instead of hard coding in a font size. The author gives a great example of a website for eyeglasses where the font was hard coded at 11px. While this might work for someone with healthy eyes, someone searching for eyeglasses might prefer to have control of setting the default size to something larger. By coding text size in relatives, this allows users the ability to control the overall font size of the site. The design controls the relative font sizing of headers and content.

Scalable Navigation

• This next topic goes hand in hand with flexiable text. Now that the font size can change, the website needs to behave well with these shrinking and growing letters. Scalable navigation allows for this. Instead of having fixed size images for your navigation. Buttons can be created using thin images slices that can be arrayed. Link button names can then be written as text with the graphic slices arrayed as needed behind them. This not only saves design time & graphic maintenance it make the website faster and more accessible to search engines.

Elastic & Fluid Layouts

• This chapter provides a great discussion on the benefit of layouts without tables. Furthermore, it explains how to utilize your viewer screen size by defined sections as percentages of the entire space. This enables websites to present well on both a wide and narrow screen. It also enable the ability to have the html content order different from the website presentation order. In other words you can place higher quality content at the beginning of your html even if it is not the first item displayed on the website.

Creating Floats

• Floats is a powerful part of table free web design. However, with all the wonderful browsers out there that each seem to interpret directions differently getting things to work as desired can be tricky. This chapter does a great job explaining how to achieve cross browser compatibility.

These are just some of the topic covered in this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to refine their web design skills. It will take you from creating an okay site to building a high quality site you will be proud of.