A web firm out of the U.K., CX Partners, says their user testing sessions document that scrolling is, in fact, NOT objectionable to most web surfers.  Or, at the very least, not an obstacle to their getting what they want from a site:

Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want.

What is the fold?

Above the fold is a graphic design term that refers to important content being on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. It’s commonly used on the web to describe the area you see on a web page before you have to scroll down the page.

Why we don’t worry about the fold

People tell us that they don’t mind scrolling and the behaviour we see in user testing backs that up. We see that people are more than comfortable scrolling long, long pages to find what they are looking for. A quick snoop around the web will show you successful brands that are not worrying about the fold either:

The firm uses an eye tracker which creates a heat map for each user in the test group.  These maps are combined into a collective heat map which documents what the test group was looking at on a page.  Not only do their heatmaps show users looking at the scroll bar (indicating its use), they indicate ‘below the fold’ hot spots.  One somewhat surprising result was that less content ‘above the fold’ actually encouraged exploration below.

Of course, as designers, we are completely fascinated by this research.  It helps us build sites that perform better for our clients.  However, with so many of you blogging and otherwise impacting the layout of your sites regularly, we’ve decided to start sharing some of the research with you, so you can use it when you create posts and pages.  When we do, we’ll conclude with the briefest of what we think you should take away from the post.  In this case:

Learn 3 things:

1. Less is more.  Don’t cram everything together; leave ‘whitespace’, room for the eye to rest between photos and text when you compose a post or page.  It will encourage visitors to wander elsewhere on the page.
2. Avoid the use of horizontal lines.  Take care that your horizontal block of images don’t create an imaginary line indicating this is the end of the page or the start of the footer.  Avoid a row of buttons or thumbnail images that send the message to STOP reading further.
3. Frames are evil!  Long-time followers will recognize this familiar soap box; we’re always happy to have another reason to encourage you to avoid the use frames and iframes, those in-page windows to another web page or site.  Of course, there is a place and time for everything but this is one practice with a very short list of acceptable applications.  In the context of today’s topic, they simply trick the user into thinking there is less content than there is by shortening the page.  As a result, content is frequently not seen.

We’ve been teaching our clients engaged in search marketing how to select specific, long, key phrases for several years now.  Take, for example, an art gallery at the Port of Ilwaco, Washington.  Such a business could throw a lot of money at search optimization and marketing for the term “art gallery”.  They could show up #1 in the search results of all the top engines.  But would it net them any sales of art?  Not very likely, as the searcher was apt to be looking for a specific art gallery in a specific locale and/or a particular medium, style or piece. 

However, taking a more pragmatic (and less expensive) approach to do well for the long tail keyword phrase “Sol’s Art Gallery port of Ilwaco WA watercolors”, we hypothesized, would net perhaps fewer, but more interested parties.  The trick is to combine research of what terms are being searched with what long tail phrases are organic to the business itself so as to choose terms that are, in fact, searched, but very specifically. 

Bill Tancer of Hitwise presents recent research proving out what we’ve been teaching.  The truth is, the vast majority of searches are for what search optimizers call ‘long tail’ phrases.  These are phrases which are specific and include several words (ex. “Sol’s Art Gallery port of Ilwaco WA watercolors”).  It’s nice to have research backing up what we know to be true from first-hand experience. 

Bill Tancer’s post – Sizing Up the Long Tail - gives some stats using the great visual of a lizard representing all search traffic.  Imagine, if you will, the lizard:

…the head and body together only account for 3.25% of all search traffic! In fact, the top terms don’t account for much traffic:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Rather stunning, isn’t it?  In this context, you could almost say that the tail is the only part of the lizard that small business owners should be concerned with.

But that’s what we’ve been telling you all along. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  Enjoy your lizard!

We’ve written before about the Small Business Development course Keith & Keleigh took through Clatsop College and with which they continue as alumni.  In December the 3 years of students and the alums gather for a joint class and this year’s topic is social networking.  Below is a preview of our responses to the questions asked.  But first, if you don’t care about anything else, read this:

The power of social networking is in building relationships.  Think of the ways you build relationships in real life and then how to replicate or enhance that experience online.  You’re building trust.  You’re providing some free answers and advice.  If you’re compelling enough to follow, you’ll get followed.  If you’re followed, you’re going to build trust and relationships and THAT is what ends up making your business the choice when the comes time to purchase what you sell.

Take 2:12 and watch Guerrilla Marketer Seth Godin on facebook and relationship building:

Our site & social network sites ­There is overlap here but many of the followers of these sites are unique:

• www.beachdog.com (our company blog/website; customer-focused)
• www.facebook.com/beachdogcom (our company facebook page; customer-focused)
• www.facebook.com/funbeach (our tourism-promoting profile; focused on clients’ customers)
• www.facebook.com/longbeachpeninsula (our tourism-promoting page; focused on clients’ customers)
• http://twitter.com/beachdogcom (tends to be peer-focused)
• www.youtube.com/beachdogdotcom (our own and some customer videos)
• www.youtube.com/funbeachcom (our own and others’ tourism-promoting videos)
• www.linkedin.com/in/beachdog (definitely peer-focused)

This list is a lot longer than what’s shown here but these are not to be ignored in our Marketing Plan.

How you can make managing your sites easy:

Defining hard vs easy is the first step; what’s hard for YOU?  For us, time is the bugaboo, so we automate as much as possible.  Yahoo ‘scrapes’ our feed from Twitter & YouTube to create a site of its own and, should we post there, it pushes it back to Twitter.  Our company site automatically posts to our facebook page, which in turn posts the first 140 characters to twitter.  In other words, any effort we make is populated throughout the appropriate social networks, reducing the time spent.

We’ve found the highest response when we mix it up a little, so we try to blog post to our company site at least 1-3 times per week and then also profile post to each of our facebook pages and Twitter account 1-3 times a week.  We don’t always reach those goals but we never let up on the pressure to do so because it works.  We’re currently spending about 2 hours per week blogging and maintaining our social network sites.

For the tourism-promoting facebook, we spend more time because we’re managing about 1800 friends through the facebook profile and nearly 1000 through the fan page.  Our most popular YouTube video has just under 500 views.  We’re currently building these networks and are just starting to feel we’ve built enough to fairly track return on investment.  Is time spent here resulting in increased customer loyalty and/or extending the reach to new visitors?  Is this investment successfully increasing tourism to the region?

Nick O’Neill wrote a solid, brief article on AllFacebook.com on ‘How To Plan Your Monthly Facebook Page Strategy’: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/09/how-to-plan-your-monthly-facebook-page-strategy.  He’s a big fan of planning your strategy, lining up tasks and letting go of the rest.  And that’s a good plan because it is very easy to get sidetracked online and waste time.

How do you drive people to your website? How do you use search engines, email and/or social networking?

People are always surprised to hear this but I’m not a huge fan of search engine marketing for most small businesses.  There are markets that benefit from it; hotels, for example.  And 99% of sites benefit from a basic search engine optimization which will gain them a reasonable organic result for the terms unique to them such as business name + location and what you do + location.  Beyond that, the cost of vying for that top-10 spot for a competitive search term is usually more than the return it nets.  Many businesses benefit from well-managed adwords; that’s another conversation.  The point is we don’t use search engines to drive traffic to our own site, other than in the most natural sense.

90% of our business is word of mouth, so we spend most of our energy and advertising budget making our current customers happy and thanking them for sharing their positive experiences with their friends and colleagues.  Social networking fits nicely with that; we can give kudos and links online and share the good works of our clients companies with the rest of our ‘fan’ base.

While we encourage many of our customers to use broadcast email campaigns, we don’t actively engage in these ourselves.  Not because they don’t work –they REALLY do.  And not because they’re expensive – they’re not.  Not because they’re hard to set up or manage – these are both pretty simple, too.  We don’t use them because we’re realistic about our own time commitment to the process.  These campaigns work best when they are used at regular intervals.  We believe they are more harmful than helpful when used erratically and we aren’t currently in a position to use them consistently, so we’re skipping—for now.

How do you actually sell? What do you do on your website to encourage people to buy?

I don’t think of what we do as selling.  We solve problems.  We help people get more customers and merchandise themselves and their products.  As a result, our website is blog-based and about 1/3 to ½ of the posts are telling the stories of the work we’ve done, including the problem that was solved by that work.

We ask our customers to do the same thing; don’t talk about the features, talk about the solution the product or service provides.  Talk about it on your site and through your social networks.  We also ask them to talk about their experience with us and with other local businesses and to keep it positive.  If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.  If you have something a little negative to say and can follow it up with how that business fixed your concern, great.  Otherwise, keep comments community-building–for your sake and theirs.

We do facebook-only specials from time to time, which have turned out to be popular; a code word or a coupon posted only to facebook and pushed to twitter.  We once did a video that rewarded viewers with an ‘Easter Egg’ of a coupon at the end and that was a royal flop.  In hindsight, I see a way to re-tool that to make it work but…

The power of social networking is in building relationships.  Think of the ways you build relationships in real life and then how to replicate or enhance that experience online.  You’re building trust.  You’re providing some free answers and advice.  If you’re compelling enough to follow, you’ll get followed.  If you’re followed, you’re going to build trust and relationships and THAT is what ends up making your business the choice when the comes time to purchase what you sell.

How can you tell that what you planned is really happening?  How/what do you track?  What analytics do you use?

For our company site, we use both logfile stats, read through Analog, and Google Analytics, because they track the same information in vastly different ways.  They both cross-check one another and provide different interpretive results for things like, which are algorithmic rather than factual.

For our social networking, I look at how many interactions we are having and how quality they are in terms of relationship building.  Facebook gives you a nice tool on your page that analyzes this for you but only you know if those interactions are converting to sales.  On a monthly basis, how many staff hours went to engaging online and how many jobs came to us as a result?  What kind of jobs were they – the kind we want to attract?  If I don’t like the answers, I look at what needs changing – the amount of time we’re spending?  The way we’re interacting?  What we’re offering our fans?  What haven’t we tried?  One fabulous aspect of this type of marketing is the instant gratification you get from your efforts.  It makes it easy to course correct before you invest too much in any one direction.

Final Thoughts:

Seth Godin and Tom Peters on blogging

Sabrina turned on our Flip video cam when giving Blaine of the 42nd Street Café an introduction to WordPress, the software that runs his web site and blog, so he would have something to take with him and remember what he’d learned.  He said we could share it with our other WordPress customers, so here you go:

Introduction to WordPress, Part 1  (10 minutes)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAfkD82HC8U[/youtube]

Introduction to WordPress, Part 2  (9 minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIO16SnGdjI

Introduction to WordPress, Part 3  (9 minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CZBd8tSuk8

Introduction to WordPress, Part 4  (8 minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyxqEGV7f3Q