'Net Features : oneupweb

The New Rules of Website Design, Usability and Revenue

Linc Wonham — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:30:00 GMT

Your website can be your business’ greatest asset or its biggest liability, depending on how well you understand the relationship between visual aesthetics, usability and sales. Digital marketing leader OneUpWeb has released a new study that breaks down the keys to success in today’s ultra-competitive environment.

The white paper, Revolutionizing Website Design: The New Rules of Usability, reveals the new standards in website form and function and shows how they directly affect sales. To identify the formula for building balanced websites that deliver maximum returns, OneUpWeb evaluated 100 sites across four different industries: e-commerce, business-to-business, travel and hospitality, and higher education.

Among the findings on which they based the report were the following:
•    E-commerce websites had a 45-percent task failure rate
•    Participants in the study were “skeptical” of companies whose sites lacked professional-quality design, regardless of the ability to navigate those sites
•    Travel and hospitality sites received the lowest user-experience ratings of the four industries

Follow the above link to download the free report and determine if your design is driving customers to or away from your business.

Social Media Eye Tracking Study

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:28:00 GMT

A new eye tracking study conducted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by digital marketing provider Oneupweb reveals some interesting trends, including the way users interact with paid ads in social media.

“We wanted to know if people actually look at ads when they are on social sites like Facebook, YouTube. Or in the case of Twitter, where will they likely look for those ads when they do begin to appear,” explains Oneupweb CEO and Founder Lisa Wehr. “We found that not only do users spend time viewing paid ads on social networking sites, they often look at these ads before actual search results.”

The social media eye tracking study revealed some other interesting statistics about searches conducted on social media sites:

- The study found that 65% of participants engaged with sponsored ads within the first 10 seconds of their search.
- Scan paths do not follow the order of the search result positions. Often, sponsored ads were looked at before the third or fourth result.
- There is not a significant difference in fixation duration across the first four results or sponsored ads on both Facebook and YouTube.
- 50% of participants were satisfied with their brand search on Twitter. Many liked that they could find the most current opinions about a product.

“Since search engines became the main way that people conduct searches for businesses, products and information, we’ve been under an assumption that people search a certain way. On search engines, a viewer’s eye starts at the top left hand side of the page, moving downward and slightly to the right,” explains Wehr. “Therefore, they are likely to click on just the first few search results that appear at the top of the page. But this just isn’t the case on social networking sites.” Wehr goes on to explain that search is changing and people are entering social networking sites with different expectations.
“As more people engage with social media, the way they are interacting with brands is being affected and their behavior changes.”

On the Wire at Website Magazine (Submit Your News!)

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:06:00 GMT

Several months into 2008, Website Magazine dropped its popular On The Morning Wire blog post series, which highlighted important news releases for the current day related to Web professionals - SEOs, SEMs, designers, developers - you get the picture. Those posts were exceedingly popular with our readers, as they covered a lot of content in brief, but it was also a pain to manage. Fortunately, that process has been greatly simplified thanks to a little bit of coding and, of course, a healthy dose of creativity.

Starting today, if you publish a press release on PRWeb or directly at the Website Magazine News Release section, your content (relevant content, of course) will appear at WebsiteMagazine.com. News releases are published on the home page (bottom right) which means added exposure in our community and any links you manage to include are dofollow so participating means an added boost to your site on the SERPs.

If you're a company providing Web-related products or services and you've got some news to share, submit it at WebsiteMagazine.com/newsreleases today (and everyday).

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