The JKB Marketing Blog

When you are creating an advertising campaign, most agencies will stress the creative aspect. They'll show you eye-catching designs and present truly inventive ideas.

What they may fail to mention is that where you run your ad is run has a 6 times greater effect [PDF] than the ad itself according to research completed by Atlas DMT.

In the big picture, it makes perfect sense. You can't win the game if you're not in the game. And to be in the game, you have to be in the ballpark.

Obvious, isn't it?

And yet, many advertisers spend all their energy on creating a new campaign. They make sure your ad has practiced its swings, has all the latest gear and is wearing the hippest uniform. As long as it looks the part, where it plays is often an after-thought.

Test your message in different media. Look for the best game in town. Only after finding the game should you worry whether your shoes are tied.

The best advertisement in the world won't help at all if it is placed in the wrong context. In contrast, a mediocre message in the proper context will do ok. Once you find the proper vehicle and the right context, now you can focus on the creative to make an even bigger impact.

For the first time, Microsofts Internet Explorer has lost market share. Granted, Ie only lost about 1% of its share and it is still the dominant browser on the market garnering a market share over 94%.

But flashing back to 1997, Netscape had the dominant browser. When Microsoft decided to bundle IE into Windows 98, the writing was on the wall for Netscape. IE dominance has grown ever since.

However, being the big dog makes you a target. The continuing security issues for Microsoft and the rise of the open-source movement have opened some chinks in the IE armor. It hasn't helped that IE has not been significantly upgraded since 1999.

Lately, browsers such as Opera, Safari, Netscape 7 and especially Mozilla's Firefox have been consistently adding new converts.

The benefit for consumers is a host of freely available web browsers. As long as the new browsers are standards-compliant, this is great news for web developers and web users alike.

The amount of whitespace you use in your online layouts affects the reading speed, reading comprehension and overall satisfaction of your content.

A recent study conducted by the Software Usability Research Laboratory showed that college students had greater comprehension of articles with larger (10mm) margins. While they read the text with the smaller (2mm) margins faster by 8 words per minute, they expressed greater satisfaction and less physical fatigue with the larger margins.

And when larger margins were combined with slightly greater leading between lines(5mm vs. 4mm), the overall satisfaction level sky-rocketed. (Leading is the space from baseline to baseline of lines in a paragraph.)

While there were some definite drawbacks to this study -- only 20 students were used, and it only tested a single column format -- I believe it holds true for any copy over a few paragraphs. You can make your site's content easier to read by allowing for margins all around your paragraphs and not condensing the leading between lines.

Web usability guru Jakob Nielson on web users:

After ten years of watching Web users, one clear conclusion is that they are utterly selfish and live in the moment. Giving users exactly what they want, right now, is the road to Web success

You will be greatly rewarded by taking the time to examine your website and look at it from a user's perspective.

Does your site have a clearly defined purpose?
Is it easy to scan?
Are there any unimportant elements where important elements should be?
Is your content in its proper context?
Does your site load quickly?
Does your site's appearance match the image you are trying to send?
Is your site out-dated, or contain out-dated elements?

The web is a consumer-dominated media. When visitors become frustrated for any reason, they can simply click a button and be done with you. You have to have relevant content in an easy-to-understand form. You need to have intuitive navigation with explicit labels. You need to direct the user to do exactly what you want them to do.

By taking a fresh look at your site and making some minor modifications, you can lessen your bounce rate and see increses in your conversion rate.

If you're going to have a site, you might as well get the most out of it. Right?

I greatly dislike intro pages, whether they're long-winded flash intros or graphical splash pages. I am not alone. Nearly 80% of consumers stated that they HATE Flash intro pages.

Wow!

Now, there are some Flash advocates that don't buy this result. So MarketingSherpa went to one of Macromedia's own usability expert who summed up all that is wrong with splash pages perfectly:

When we have clients who are thinking about Flash
splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.

Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how many people punch the mime out.

That should give you a good idea as to how well their splash page will be received. That's the crux of it.

Sure, there are always exceptions to the rule. But they are few and far between.

Flash should not be imposed on the unsuspecting web browser.

Use Flash to create some great visual effects and interactive games. Flash is also great for creating real-time web applications. You can have customers customize the look of your product and see the results instantly. Using Flash in this manner benefits everyone involved.

A recent survey conducted by the Software Usability Research Laboratory investigated the online reading habits of 330 respondents.

You may want to consider that 30% of the respondents print out and read product information offline. Is your site easy to print? What does it look like when it is printed? You could be losing customers by not knowing the answers.

While most of the respondents (72.7%) read their newlsetters online, that still leaves over a quarter who prefer to print out their newsletters.

The size of the document and its purpose are two major reasons why someone would choose to read offline. People read online if the copy is short (under 5 pages) or for entertainment purposes. While they like to print out longer or more important information.

There exists a great demand to print out your site's information. You should test to make sure your key pages print out correctly. You can do this using by designing your page from the beginning with printing in mind, using a print-specific stylesheet, or creating a link that points to a separate printable page.

Otherwise, you could be alienating 25-30% of your visitors!

The search engine competition is really heating up. As Google prepares for life as a publicly traded company with a whole slew of new concerns, a couple other major search players stand ready to gain share if the leader should begin to slip up.

Yahoo is currently testing a new interface. It may look somewhat familiar to you. I like the simple, uncluttered new design.

Microsoft is about to enter the fray. Currently MSN serves results from third party vendors Yahoo and Overture. However, MSN has been aggressivley conducting its own crawl and is testing its own algorithm. You can try the new MSN Search for yourslef. When I briefly tried it out, I found it gives relevant results, but often repeats the same site over and over again. Their algorithm seems to favor the clean style of coding we use for our sites, and places high weight on the text in the title bar. We'll see where it goes from here.

It's been a long time, but search engine companies have found a model that finally allows them to post a profit. If there's money to be made, you can expect greater competition. As search engines learn to juggle the needs of searchers, advertisiers and webmasters against those of spammers, we will see a continually improving product.