I receive a lot of feedback about NewsTrendz. Probably one of the biggest concerns, is that the site is just not good looking. It’s not that people are saying that the site is ugly; it just doesn’t have the right “flair”. Not one piece of flair and certainly not 16.
If we had the technical ability or the resources to run a proper VD/IA/UI/UX/LOLZ process for the The Trendz then we would. I would much rather look like the guy on the right then the guy on the left.
But jokes aside, there’s a bit of resourcefulness going on here that I wanted to convey.
Early on we saw pretty quickly that our traffic patterns were entirely search based. We originally wanted NewsTrendz to be a news destination for people but it quickly became apparent that people came to us from a search engine, and that they were simply looking for more information and moving on.
At this point, with our front end ability limited to simply moving boxes around and changing fonts, we decided to mimic our site on Google search results. It’s not pixel for pixel accurate. But the general layout, colors, etc are as close as possible.
We did this because Google invests a ton of research into their UI/UX. Every color, every layout, every pixel, every word choice is scrutinized with endless amounts of data. It’s for a good reason, because if a simple color change adds a .00001% CTR percentage to their ads, then that adds millions in revenue to their bottom line.
The best thing we could do, if we had neither the talent nor the research budget to do this right, is to ape another company that does do it right. For most companies, this probably won’t be effective, but for our product that simply wants to show results of information related to trends, this was as a good a plan as any.
This is why NewsTrendz looks the way it does. There is a science to the madness, or at least a borrowed science. So far, it’s worked well for us. We’re not the prettiest girl at the dance, but we get to focus on other things that we need to get done and not waste too much time on things that we’re not naturally good at. Most importantly, we know we’re not doing something egregiously wrong.
One day, when things work out, we’ll visit the plastic surgeon and then we’ll be hot.
August 12, 2009 at 5:36 pm |
[...] the site will keep chugging since it’s still hosted on AOL. People have already commented on how ugly The Trendz is, so we can’t get much uglier if we lose our images and css. If it happens, we’ll move [...]