I was toiling through my huge RSS feeds list and was somewhat surprised to see that Six Revisions had published yet another retro colors showcase and tutorial. If I’m not mistaken, the retro trend had its days of glory in 2005-2006 and was less used nowadays though still a sure bet. Even Jonathan Snook came back to it just last month. The idea here is not to delve into retro design but into the assumption that all the web design clichés that we now have are here to stay for ever.

Clichés you said?

Some call them trends but all in all its like this. Someone gets an idea and builds a site with a specific style and layout. This is new and fresh. Web design showcases and popular magazines put this site in their never ending lists of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. Then, some other guy will draw inspiration from it and mix it with the inspiration from another list of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and come up with a new site that will itself be part of a “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. And this will start a never ending cycle.

Back to the future.

After some time, when new trends will be catching up, the older clichés will tend to get into the background. New elements, new ideas, new “past” inspired clichés will come up making web design seem bland after running around the same type of sites all the time (this explains why the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius ended up with a really “common” theme). You can’t avoid it, you need to get inspiration and your clients will have seen a lot of the surrounding sites around before asking you for a specific design.

Then you get that little miracle spark. One designer will click around in those “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” archives and get his/her eyes watery of the reminiscence of past styled designs. He/she would think “Hey, why not go back to this? It would be a real change and an adventure!”. And there you go again, a new venture with elder styles.

What next?

Well, the elder styles mix up with the newest “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and you get another new new old based trend… and the uroboros is complete. This is how the clichés will carry on living in web design and will still be served in some way or another.

Its just like those trainer-problem filled trainee(s) cliché film scenario that Hollywood just seems to have the secret:

A great trainer (sometimes retired or having left the competition because of some sad life changing experience) does not want to train some guy or team. The trainer has his own problem and the trainee or team also have theirs. There’s a lot of misunderstanding all around but somehow they get to build up a relationship and solve their problems together while winning their contest and living happy lives.

How many of these films have you seen? Even the award winning “Million Dollar Baby” is based on this scheme proving that this still works. Another award winning one in this category is “Rocky”.

Conclusion.

So, as a bottom line, we could say that Web designing is like being the “Karate Kid” :

Wax on, wax off !

“Form follows function”, most of us have heard this at least once in our lives. This catch phrase is one of the bases of architecture. Its primary meaning is:

The principle is that the shape of a building or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose.

It has lead and still leads to hot debates on its intended purpose. We can however take it literally and analyse it from a Web design angle.

The need for function.

Why would we need function in the first place, especially in the world of Web design? We’ve already seen how to optimise a site for search engines even before its coding:

• 5 tips to a successful seo oriented web project
• The Head element in SEO basics
• SEO in your code

This is one aspect of Web site designing. The other aspect remains the fact that a website has to fulfill a purpose. There are some real world cases that IT experts tend to forget. 90% of the persons out there are not that at ease with the web or a computer as we are. Its so easy to just say: “Ok, they’re not my primary audience so what the f***?”. This is where the leap has to be made.

You’ve integrated the concept of SEO, now integrate this one: people buy products and services, not search engines. Design your sites accordingly!

Be effective, profitable and convert.

Web designers, this is not about you. Many a time a web designer can end designing a site with this idea in mind: “how will it look in my portfolio?”. Its not about your employer also (if you’re in a company), you’re out there to answer to a need, conversion. This is where your work gets interesting. In the current credit crush and economic crisis climate, a website must not be a cost to a business but a real revenue center.

Another thing that should be taken into consideration is that web users, though not all computer savvy, are getting more and more ruthless and demanding from websites as well as a huge demand for simplicity. This takes user experience from yet a,other angle and calls for more usability for more profits. An example is the lack of conversion tricks on some of the Mauritian websites.

DHTML, JQuery, Ajax…

Eye candy! That’s one word that sums it all! We love that, we love the animation thing, the out of this world experience that lasts… 10 minutes. Yes, once the user has seen it, it gets boring to him. When I started my Web design career I was so easily influenced by all those javascript and DHTML tricks that would make a whole page go pop. And we didn’t even have ADSL at the time. I would script for the sake of scripting but there was not any real function to it. This where we fail to understand the function of a site.

Giving more importance to the form turns the site away from its goals and the project as well. A website designed like that will not work (in terms of returns on investment)!

The Mauritian education system has evolved a long time ago but I’m from that generation that was torn between the traditions that the parents were trying to keep under control, and our lives ny the way, and a more modern world with huge western influence. Depending on how “cool” your parents were you were either the “Beverly Hills 90210″ fan or just the nerd round the corner who could only watch “Samachar”.

Reading was an IMPOSED activity. I remember that when I was in standard 5 and 6, no kid in my class had the right to play, not even run, during the recess to keep us in under constant working pressure. Well, you could be a rebel like Johnny Depp in “21 Jump street” but corporal punishment allowed the teachers to easily stop you from dreaming of becoming a hero. We were 9-11 year old race horses and the major part would leave the competition grounds quite quickly in the years to come. You had to be a successful race horse.

We had to read. You had to read. They had to read. English books being a preference. We still talked English like Italian shepherd dogs but still had to read loads of books. If I recall, we had those two books in French and English where we started learning to read: “Rémi et Marie” & “Robin & Rita”. By the age of 5 you were already reading your first book.

Looking back, I was not the type of kid prepared for any reading spree. I was living my wonderful villager kid’s life in the North of Mauritius. But one thing, one sole thing changed everything. It was not the forced reading at school, it was the compensation for absent parents when they left and moved into the city. Like many Mauritian families, the parents worked from dawn till dusk. Along with that they’ve always been pretty traditionalist, so forget about being open-minded and all that.

My parents had as much confidence in me as they would have in a man-eating tiger and always thought that I would be up to some sort of mischief. And it got worse when holidays came by, this somehow explains why I hate holidays. To cope with the burden of having me at home, my father had his secret weapon. His work’s library! This made most of my “collez” holidays were the most bitterly anticipated moments of my life. My father’s workplace had a huge library which turned out to become my prison for weeks.

What could I do? I had the choice between going there or having a good thrashing and then going there. No wonder I chose the first option. I did go there dragging my feet. In the end you try to kill time before it kills you and just start reading what falls in your hands. I made friends with the librarian and after some time I would ask for specific books and authors that got on his orders. I got to read all the books “new”, then other people’s kids would have them. I was like a one person recommendation board for teenage books. At the age of 13 I read my first Terry Pratchett book which would bring me to Tolkien, Herbert and a lot of other precious fantasy authors while discovering Anne of the Green Gables, the Rougon-Macquart series and Sir Conan Doyle.

As years went past, I was granted access to the most interesting section of the library for a 16 year old testosterone-filled and high on hormones teenager… the Gerard de Villiers and adult erotic section. There I simply carried on reading those SAS (Son Altesse Sérénissime) books which were a mix between James Bond, Dan Brown (had he written at that time) and, well I have no other reference to erotic literature, but some pretty agile person who would transform primal sensations into words. When thinking about it I read those mainly for adventure as the erotic parts were only 0.05% of the books.

These teenage days actually have an impact on our adult life. When my wife and I moved to our new city some 4 months ago, I was amazed by the number of book filled boxes we had. I sold nearly my comics and manga collections over the past 3 years but still had loads of books around. This is where you find out that you just carry on reading all the time.

I really don’t know about the other people of my generation but having books around and reading is just natural now and we don’t even buy them just to say “I’m reading books”. If you want to have an idea of my recent reading these are the books I read over the past month: Terry Pratchett’s (UK) Unseen Academicals, Natacha Appanah’s (Mauritius) Blue Bay Palace and I’m halfway through Ananda Devi’s (Mauritius) Le Sari Vert, along with a long term run of Guthrie Govan’s (UK) Creative Guitar Techniques.

This looks like a flabbergasting John Chowish title but there is a reason to it. It is actually an experiment I lead over 10 days and looks like @kurtavish and @blebon found out the trick and jumped on the wave. The Wave, that’s actually the idea of the experiment. It was an experiment on trends and their impact on a site. The other thing I wanted to see was the increase in traffic with the bounce rate that goes with it. All it cost me to do this was the time I put in posting the trendy topic on the site. The topic in question was to offer Google Wave invites for free (currently running at 15€ apiece on ebay).

The idea.

The idea in itself is simple. Being curious about everything on the web I got into the Google Wave waiting list just as it was budding. Like the 99 999 other lucky Wave enthusiasts, I received my wave login along with some invites to send. The marketing test idea was already here. 100 000 persons, this means a total of 2 million lucky Wave users compared to the billions of possibilities. So I launched out to give them away to see how people would react to the trend.

And they DID react. All in all, this site had a 179% increase in traffic. The increase is easy because of the low but really precise audience the Bureau has. So, it was more important to check the bounces. This would show whether the site was going with the trend or nor. I’ll let you find it out by yourself:

1.23% bounce rate. Meaning that the message got to the reader. This is where you can achieve great things. Related posts and all will drive the readers to check other parts of the site and maybe catch up some interest in your content.

The future.

The contest giveaway idea is not new but the way to do it is also important. The current technique for the Google Wave invite was to either have a tweet or a blog post. Why? 2 reasons:

• The site got 2000 visits with a 1.18% bounce rate over the 10 days, just take 15 persons with at least a hundred followers who will tweet your contest, you’ll be reaching 1500 persons in one go. Along with that, the person makes a back link to your site. Many would say: “A Twitter backlink huh?”. Well, my Twitter profile has a PR 4, other Twitter pages can be 3 or 2. In the long run, the total amount of back links will pay.
• Following the same idea, the blog posts and buzz over other blogs get you to have traffic from other sources. You can also receive the benefits of back links from these. These also will be a good element for your SEO in the long run.

These marketing techniques are really great for increasing your site’s presence on the web. Now, this is not a MMO (make money online) blog. Therefore the persons getting into the contest and actually reading the content are a targeted audience interested in the Web and Wave, while a lot of people on MMO sites would just come round and go. If you want to really use these techniques, you have to understand what type of readers will be attracted and what are the chances of having them staying and participating.

Here we are then. The 15 Google Wave invite winners have been selected by automatic randomising on Random.org. So here is the list of winners:

1. lee.albert followed by the email host.
2. sapnaisram_69 followed by the email host.
3. edhofmann followed by the email host.
4. grissom.egg followed by the email host.
5. lordlupe followed by the email host.
6. jacharakis followed by the email host.
7. kim followed by the email host.
8. anomolea1223 followed by the email host.
9. ppratik96 followed by the email host.
10. ornitorinco followed by the email host.
11. guilhermebuenovaz followed by the email host.
12. jackwooffindin followed by the email host.
13. webmastergyk followed by the email host.
14. icarly followed by the email host.
15. cdmike followed by the email host.

I’ve listed these just like this to be sure these are the unique winners. Thanks to all those who participated. For those winners who do not want the invite anymore, please check back in the list of comments and tell me to whom you want the invite sent to.

Cheers to you all and congratulations to the winners.

Let’s be honest for a bit. Web design is evolving in Mauritius at a slower pace than everywhere else. There is still a lot to do and a lot to learn. As constantly stated on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, there is still a gap to bridge between marketing techniques and web design here. This brings up the problem of conversion. There’s a lot of Web design companies in Mauritius and all in all you can get at least 50 new websites launched every year. The main problem is that those sites is that conversion is not maximised.

A hotel website.

Let’s take a real life example. A lot of websites are “tourism” oriented in Mauritius. These are great for promoting beaches and hotels. Below is a screenshot of one of them (I deliberately took only part of the header and the footer off to concentrate on the content) :

Looks like a normal website. There is a problem here though. No element jumps out to your face. No element drives your attention. No element makes a “call to action”. You might have read a lot about these “calls to action” but they are not yet integrated in the Mauritian “web design culture”. So what is a “call to action”. This is what really makes a site convert an visitor into a customer. It is the way a website builds its return on investment.

A call to action is that element that would take a website to a higher level. So how would it be done on the basis of our example website?

Content and conversion.

As stated before, knowing your clients’/site’s content is a must. This is the core of your website. Knowing the content will help you understand (and it is better if you work with your client) the main objective of the website and how to make it convert. In our particular example, it is obvious that the main element of the site, the one that converts, the one that makes the site work for the global enterprise is… “reservations”.

Being a hotel means that getting reservations is the most important element of the business. Thus, this should be set forward. Here the problem is that the reservations tab is nowhere to be seen at the first glance. You have to read the whole menu to find it.

Solutions

The available solutions are fairly simple. They imply knowing and understanding the aim of the website and setting some elements to the forefront. Instead of showing a redesign of our example, it might be better to show a series of inspirational “call to action buttons” that would help transforming a visitor into a customer. Note how all these are built and are set to maximize the conversion of visitors into customers.

Conclusion

As you see, all these sites have a call to action button that incites the visitor to do an action. This button stands out and grabs the visitors attention. This is one of the most common and efficient ways of converting visitors into customers.