It's good to make your website or application as beautiful as possible, but not at the expense of usefulness - sais Gerry McGovern in his latest article.

Organization and professional ego often work against simplicity. Over the years I have heard very many senior managers say that they want their website to have the wow factor. Unfortunately, at a management level vanity sometimes trumps sanity. Designers are often beautiful people. They dress well and they want their websites and applications to be seen to be well-dressed.

Beauty is highly desirable but simplicity and usefulness are the overwhelming fashion of our age. Just because it's beautiful does not mean it's useful.

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Image source: funkytrend.com

Plastic Logic has getting by with some eastern love since last year, when RUSNANO's $700 million investment helped the e-reader maker land its Plastic Logic 100 in Russian schools. The latest fruit of that partnership is a prototype of its first flexible color e-reader display, which delivers 4,000-plus hues at a resolution of 75 ppi. The screen contains some 1.2 million plastic transistors, and it's able to bend without distorting images thanks to a top filter and a 150-ppi display below that flex at the same rate. Skip past the break for a demo clip of the tech in action, appropriately featuring some Matryoshka dolls.

Article published on engadget.com

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Companies that take on a structured approach towards conversion optimization are twice as likely to see a large increase in sales.

Most companies are too caught up in the “business as usual syndrome”, and they rarely take a second to stop and think about really focusing on conversion optimization.

A recent article on kissmetrics.com describes a few examples of  best practices and lists also several points that might push you to reconsider your conversion optimization:

• You have 0-8 seconds to make a compelling headline and landing page. After 8 seconds, the majority of visitors leave.
• Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.
• The more landing pages you have, the more leads you are likely to get.
• Product videos can increase purchases of the product by 144%.
• A 1 second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
• A/B testing is becoming the preferred method that has brought a lot of the companies the most success.

Read the article for all the details.

In this article, the usability expert Caroline Jarrett gives a couple of best practices for buttons:

1. Make buttons look like buttons.
2. Put buttons where users can find them.
3. Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one.
4. Put buttons in a sensible order.
5. Label buttons with what they do.
6. If users don’t want to do something, don’t have a button for it.
7. Make it harder to find destructive buttons.

Read the article for all the explanations.

Image source: jpmaroney.com

Like any other job, social media takes a lot of hard work, dedication and consistent engagement. Social media marketers come a dime a billion these days and you must differentiate yourself. Or die trying! Here are the top five lies you can hear about social media:

1. Social media is free
2. You need influencers
3. You’re guaranteed a new client within X amount of days
4. You need to be happy all the time
5. You should give up your real life for your online life

Read this article for more details

This 60-minute social media makeover will help companies create a more effective social media presence.

This recent article describes the following major steps:

1. Refine Your Design
2. Fill Out all Important Pages
3. Gauge Online Engagement
4. Look Over Internal Accounts 

For a business, there isn’t anything more important than the website when it comes to online marketing. It’s the focal point of your business’ online presence and your success rides on its ability to deliver to visitors a great experience.

This article lists 10 major issues that all website developer has to consider. The list is quite obvious but a useful reminder.

There’s no doubt that Facebook itself and content on it sells like hotcakes right now and is fetching more and more recognition by the passing day. It has gone from being just a social networking site to a communications system that is difficult for the entrepreneurs to be able to ignore for using it as a platform for marketing.

Facebook can be helpful in expanding the customer base, enhancing visibility and eventually develop your bottom line. Nonetheless, reaching out to each user on Facebook in not possible and neither do you want to. A rightly
researched campaign targeted well could augment the efficiency of the advertisement.

A recent article on Social Media Today discusses 9 major issues you have to consider before you first use Facebook ads.

1. Clarity in the message and design
2. Call for action
3. Incentives for the visitors
4. Capturing leads
5. Use of images
6. Targeted advertisement
7. Marketing to the current followers
8. Multiple ads
9. Advertisement manager

Today, many organisations are still busy building websites that are built-to-last. At every attempt to introduce new technology or a sparkling new design, best efforts are made to put something robust in place for as long as possible. As many web professionals have recognized, a web site won’t last. There seems to be a clear disconnect between the common managerial perception of the corporate website as something static, while the web team recognizes that to make best use of the Web, you should frequently improve your web pages as you learn along the way. The problem is that built-to-change websites don’t go far enough and have their own particular set of problems.

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When Google acquired Keyhole — the tool that would become Google Earth— in 2004, the company believed it would become the ultimate video game. Google thought travelers could peruse potential vacation destinations and movie makers could use the detailed satellite imagery as a backdrop in films.But Google had no idea the virtual globe and geographic data program had the potential to become a tool for grassroots mobilization, environmental protection and disaster response.

Today, through the Google Earth Outreach program, the tool has become a vital instrument for non-profits and public benefit organizations to visually tell their stories. For example, The World Wildlife Fund is using Google Earth to protect Sumatran tiger cubs, and relief workers used the tool for crisis response after Japan’s 2011 earthquake. Meanwhile, The HALO Trust uses the tool to locate and remove landmines, and Brazil’s Surui tribe uses Google Earth to map its home in the Amazon Rainforest.

The Google Earth Outreach team has created a tool kit of tutorials for organizations looking to create their own storytelling maps. You can add points, lines and polygons and embed YouTube videos to your annotated map.

Google Earth Outreach awards non-profits with Developer Grants to help them use mapping technologies to best tell their stories. Previous grant recipients include Water For People, which developed a mapping app to support sanitation-related businesses in African cities, and International Rivers, which created a video showing why dams aren’t the best response to climate change.

Take a look at 10 success stories from Google Earth Outreach.

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