Our team recently launched www.wholeplanetfoundation.org. The mission alone really created an extra sense of project ownership for our team.

The lead programmer who also happens to take ping pong way too seriously incorporated an element of “persistent navigation.” So what is persistent navigation?

Example: Let’s say your task is to check out Whole Food’s CEO John Mackey’s involvement with the Whole Planet Foundation. You visit http://www.wholeplanetfoundation.org/about/directors/ and click on “John Mackey.” You first notice how smoothly the page glides down to Mackey’s content. After reading up on how Whole Foods was created you are ready to get involved with the cause. Rather than having to manually scroll up or find a “back to top” link you notice the navigation has traveled with you down the page. The “Get Involved” button is just pixels away making Mr Fitts of Fitts law happy based on how close the target (in this case the “Get Involved button) is from your mouse. As my five year old son says, “How cool is that!”

Being in business since 1995 we have seen many early examples of what we are now calling persistent navigation with the use of frames for example. Framed pages are carved up into one or many scrolling boxes often creating an unwieldy experience. The framed site approach was usually jumpy and not very smooth. Based on user task feedback, we feel 12 years later persistent navigation may indeed have its place on the web as shaving a few seconds off of a visitor’s experience. Any time savings in our world is big reason to celebrate!

So what do you think about the persistent navigation approach?

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency

One of our team members attended an on-demand retail webinar to learn more about how White Lion can help their e-commerce clients grow online sales from their retail storefronts. The event was conducted by Omniture, an online business optimization provider. The topic centered on growing holiday sales as consumers grow savvier in their online shopping experience.

E-commerce sites are constantly striving for ways to improve the online retail experience for their consumers and to drive sales by turning a ‘browser’ into a ‘purchaser.’ There are some good tips worth sharing that require varying levels of commitment.

What do consumers want from their online retail experience?

• Early access to shipping information is the top rated ‘must have’ among online consumers.
• Ability to view accumulating shipping costs while shopping.
• Ability to refine search results.
• Ability to check-out without registering.

Consumers today demand their online retailer make the shopping experience and evaluation of products easier through standard tools such as multiple product pictures and product information quick views. A great example of a leader in this area is gap.com.

Savvy consumers also want to read product reviews from users that have purchased the item. By adding social networking features to the retail site, a retailer increases sales and reduces shopping cart abandonment rates. Austin-based, BazaarVoice, is quickly establishing themselves as a leader in consumer reviews.

What are the top reasons consumers leave the site?

Abandonment rates are a frustrating reality for online retailers. When consumers were asked why they leave a site without purchasing, the answers are useful in building tools to decrease the drop-off from browsing to purchasing.

Abandonment Reasons:

• Not ready to purchase.
• Shipping costs too high.
• Want to compare prices on other sites.
• Wanted to save in a cart for later.
• Did not want to register on the site.

Earlier, the survey noted that consumers want to see the shipping rates very early in the process and update as new items are added. A top reason for the abandonment rate is high shipping costs. At the same time, the surveyors conclude the earlier the shipping costs are displayed, the fewer consumers will drop out of the purchase process.

As the holidays approach, the shipping cut-off dates for delivery guarantees become very important. However, it is important to note, consumers tend to not stop a purchase transaction because of the cutoff dates.

How important are the shipping costs?

It is a myth that shipping costs are the root cause of abandonment rates for online retailing. While a majority of consumers will answer that shipping costs are very important, only 14% of people shop with the ‘must-have free shipping’ as part of their experience. Additionally, consumers are not shopping for free shipping products. Only 18% of consumers surveyed bought unplanned items because they offered free shipping. Consumers know what they are looking for when they visit an online retailer. Free shipping is not always a silver-bullet incentive to increase same-store sales.

During the holiday season, retailers are often surprised by consumer browsing and high abandonment rates for items receiving heavy publicity. The “Buyer Deal Addiction” has caught retailers off guard, including such giants as Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Consumers search for the best deals on items receiving heavy publicity. Twenty-four percent of shoppers made sure to get the lowest price and 15% only bought at stores where they would receive a discount. Another 15% only bought where they would receive free shipping.

Overall, shipping costs are important to the online retail costs insofar as transparency and early notification. The shipping costs may guide a consumer through their online experience, however they are not the ‘drive to the site’ go-to promotion. The exception may be in those areas where specific items have received heavy publicity in various media outlets.

Implementing the improvements to your online retail site can enhance the shopping experience for your consumers, decrease your overall abandonment rate and drive consumers to best-sellers.

The speakers were:

• Patti Freeman Evans, Jupiter Research Senior Retail Analyst
• Josh Dahmer, Omniture’s Senior Retail Consultant
• Seth More, Overstock.com’s Manager of Website Marketing

White Lion can provide a thorough evaluation of your e-commerce site to find new ways to improve the experience for consumers. If building your online sales is on your strategic plan, it’s never too early to get started with adding the tools that will increase sales.

Contact us to schedule an evaluation of your site today.

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency

If you are a news and information junkie and just getting starting with blogs and understanding RSS, we invite you to watch a creative and intuitive explanation of how RSS works in plain English.

To stay current with web design and web development technology and trends, I have about 40 minutes carved out daily using my free web-based “RSS aggregator” Bloglines account (with another 40 minutes for offline daily reading). If RSS wasn’t around, I would be reading a lot less in my alloted online time. RSS to me is a super-charged time saver allowing rapid dissemination of personally organized content.

Our team would also like to share some blogs (mostly web technology related) sites to help you be smarter.

Favorite blogs:

http://code.google.com/
http://www.earvolution.com/
http://Slashdot.org
http://MacRumors.com
http://www.emercedesBenz.com
http://www.vvvlad.com/blog/
http://www.schneier.com/blog/
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/
http://veerle.duoh.com/
http://www.thebignoob.com/
http://www.theronin.co.uk/blog/
http://www.37signals.com/svn/
http://www.stylegala.com/feeds/gallery.xml
http://www.cameronmoll.com/index.xml
http://alistapart.com/rss.xml
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/
http://www.aintitcool.com/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://shefinds.com/blog/
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/
http://actionscript.org/
http://www.stylegala.com/feeds/gallery.xml

Favorite vblogs:

http://rocketboom.com

Favorite informational websites:

http://www.fastcompany.com
http://www.clickz.com/
http://www.newsarama.com/
http://news.com.com/

What web-related blogs, vblogs, or informational sites should we add to the list?

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency

Let’s start with defining:

Validation Drag: The concept of form validation, although needed, will cause some visitors to abandon completing online forms. With practically unlimited web site choices some time-starved Type-A visitors may leave to never return if faced with having to correct their input on a form due to form validation.

To avoid validation drag, we need to improve the engineering, designing, and programming of forms to minimize the need to invoke validation thereby increasing posts (e.g. customer sign-ups, ecommerce orders, etc.). The form’s UI (user interface) should be designed to minimize the chance a visitor will input incomplete or incorrect data without increasing brainload time. For example, a form could give visitors feedback about inputting the correct length of a password while the visitor types.

In White Lion’s last “Programming Sync” meeting, our team of 7 programmers and I vigorously debated what we now define as validation drag. In the usability corner we want to decrease and ultimately eliminate the chance a visitor becomes frustrated while completing online tasks. In the design corner (our programmers have awesome design awareness and many with design experience) is the need to decrease “stuff” on the page.

The team had already agreed that giving feedback to password input on a form made sense. A while back a team member posted a “Web Sighting” to our Intranet noticing how Skype showed a count down mechanism to the right of the password input field.

Our debate expanded and questioned giving visitors feedback on other fields like username and email address using AJAX. At the end of the day, the debate was a great exercise in the reduction of validation drag and brainload time creating better user interfaces.

It’s really all about protecting the user, their time and their success accomplishing tasks on the site. Our Internet Agency’s approach is to collaborate and remove any potential for Validation Drag with form feedback components (e.g. password length feedback as the user types). Our team must balance the added feedback components with keeping the user interface clean and intuitive. Being a culture of data, we will continue to measure, adjust and learn from the feedback components we implement.

As a closing note I noticed a smart way to reduce validation drag when exploring SlideShare — a site I read about being a Flickr/YouTube version of sharing PowerPoint files. Note how the visitor can immediately check their username on the sign-up form.

Best of luck with the online forms you encounter,

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency

Our web development business is chuck full of a million variables. The options and possibilities for a web project are practically limitless. The options create complexity and can lead to challenges.

Oftentimes we compare our web site development approach to building high-end custom homes. I have heard building a custom home can take ten years off of your life. Why? Project management for one. I think a successful project boils down to great project management backed by a professional, supportive team.

I recently challenged my team to come up with the “secret sauce” needed to be successful in our business, no matter the job description. We collaborated and came up with a new term I am proud of called “focused paranoia,” which would be best defined as a continual stream of positively-charged insecurity resulting in a proactive mindset. We question ourselves, our team, our processes and everything around us. In summary, a daily, if not hourly or even a minute-by-minute mechanism our culture champions, ensuring we are always several steps ahead. An absolute must for a White Lion project manager or for anyone else on our team for that matter.

Whether developing a custom home or a complex web application, a team who understands the “focused paranoia” concept will lead to a successful project without the gray hairs!

Best regards,

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency

We do. Let’s first define pogo-sticking as it relates to web development:

“Pogo sticking is the act of jumping up and down through the hierarchy of a web site, repeatedly hitting the back button to move to the next item in a list.”

Let’s review two examples.

Example 1: You are researching a company online and want to peruse the company’s press release section. You start with the first press release and need to go back to the main listing page to access the next press release. Wouldn’t it be easier to be able to access the next press release from the press release detail page you were on originally?

Example 2: You are looking online for a flat panel TV. You visit a leading ecommerce site and see a great listing of flat panel TVs and drill down to one that fits your budget. You want to see the next TV the site offers and have to go back to the listing page. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could travel in a linear path to the next TV from the page you are currently on?

At White Lion we see the need for a visitor to pogo-stick as a barrier. The accumulation of barriers, both small and large, quickly add up to lost opportunities. As we all know, lost opportunities can be costly whether it’s a sophisticated ecommerce site or an interactive informational corporate site where first impressions are often made.

How do we fix the unnecessary clicks or the need to pogo-stick? It’s certainly not rocket science. The answer has been used in online photo galleries practically since the Internet went mainstream. The solution lies in a simple “Next/Previous Mechanism.” The mechanism is also armed with title tags allowing a visitor to hover their mouse over the “next” or “previous” links. The mouse hover reveals a description of what the visitor can expect. The Next/Previous Mechanism helps dramatically reduce pogo-sticking by allowing an intuitive linear path of exploration compared to having to jump back and forth from listing pages back to detail pages.

For an example of a White Lion-designed site with the Next/Previous Mechanism in action, visit the T.Stacy site. T.Stacy has been in the forefront of purchasing, managing and selling downtown properties in Austin and other cities across Texas.

Pogo sticking eliminated when viewing by city: http://www.tstacy.com/portfolio_list.php?location_id=1

Pogo sticking eliminated when viewing by project: http://www.tstacy.com/portfolio_detail.php?building_id=56

Pogosticks can be fun, but when it comes to finding information, no one likes to be bounced around.

Best regards,

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency

At White Lion we have had many contentious debates over opening content in a new window versus the same window. I have noticed over the decade plus of being in the business, many web developers do not have a unified strategy for when to open content in the same window versus opening in a new window. We do.

We feel you need a very compelling reason to open content in a new window since the visitor will be without an easy way to go back. In other words, when you open content in a new window, the visitorâ??s back button breaks. When you open content in a new window your browser thinks you are on the page numero uno so the back button is grayed out.

So who cares? Visitors do. I remember when I was in a meeting with one of our law firm clients several years ago. The managing partner was a very experienced web user. He commented how he hated (a few expressive expletives were used) when he couldn’t use his back button. The meeting triggered memory of many case studies I have read where newbie users were extremely confused when their back button failed to work. I thought here is a man who is seeing triple digit growth because of his web site and Internet technology. The managing partner was practically an expert Internet user but still didn’t really understand the “new window versus the same window” concept - he just knew he hated when a web site broke his back button.

So what is an example of an exception to the rule? As a quick aside, my wife was sucked into White Lion vortex starting out doing temporary work 9 years ago. My wife turned into the best project manager our agency has seen (if I could only get her to come out of her semi-retirement). She noticed when she would open PDF files, she would often times accidentally close out of her entire browser due to how most browsers present PDF files embedded in the browser page. My wife felt we should make PDF files open in a new window to make life easier on visitors to our sites. Our team debated and we agreed creating another White Lion standard (we have over 200). Several years later I noticed Jakob Nielsen who is a known Internet usability expert post an article and agree with my wife and our standard (see bullet point number 1).

Sincerely,

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency

Back in 1995, we were brainstorming names for our fledgling company. In a previous marketing class, I remembered a case study discussing the importance of naming companies and products which are easy for people to remember (the term “sticky” hadn’t yet been invented.) An example the case study gave was comparing the TRS80 computer in one corner compared to the easy to remember Apple computer.

So back to naming the organization, we entered into the animal domain when “Blue Whale Moving Company” was mentioned. Blue Whale is a large moving company in Austin having enormous blue whales adorned on the side of its moving vehicles - very sticky. Our first team member Mark, then said, “So how about White Lion?” We all agreed immediately the name had the core elements we were looking for: power, integrity and strength. We turned to Mark and asked, “So why White Lion?” Mark remarked from the cartoon series “Kimba the White Lion”, of course. Mark was struck we had no idea what he was talking about. Of course Google Kimba and you can see lots of people like Mark know about the cartoon series.

Sincerely,

Steve C. Kahle - Managing Principal - White Lion Internet Agency