I have always had the belief that design was a utopian endeavor to be undertaken by the smartest people in the world to solve problems. That designers were by nature helping the world evolve toward better, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more useful artifacts and services. I believe in my soul that this is true, but I also know it’s not enough.

What also needs to happen is this: business leaders need to see how designers can be innovators for them. Designers can make businesses more efficient, make products more usable, help speed communications, minimize damage to the environment, foresee the need for innovation, and be the catalyst for it.

When you think about companies such as Apple you can’t help but see the contribution that design has made to their market value. The problem is that many companies can’t see how design will affect them. I’m not sure if this is because they fear innovation or just misunderstand what design is.

Design is not:

1. Only a noun. It’s also a verb. It’s a process and a way of thinking. It’s the act of recognizing a problem, researching to find the causes, conceptualizing solutions, communicating to create awareness of these solutions, and directing their implementation.

2. Just pretty pictures or fancy words or shiny materials. In short, it’s not the end product, it is the means to get to the end. (Design can lead to end products as varied as the companies they are made for. They could be pretty pictures or shiny new materials but they could just as easily be a new business plan, a product launch strategy, a client communication tool, or an information display.)

3. Necessarily the answer to all your problems. Many companies hire designers to help innovate but then fall short on manufacturing, shipping, delivery, customer service, and a host of other requirements of a successful business. They look at design as a way to best the competition but then forget about the most important factors in the process: consumer desire, consumer need, and consumer satisfaction.

Design is:

1. A strategic imperative. As more and more businesses see the value of a design-centered approach to problem solving and innovation, they will realize they need to do the same to stay competitive. Design can’t be an afterthought; it needs to be an integral part of the company.

2. A way to create true innovation. The research and development inherent in the design process are really the only ways to mitigate risk in the search for the new. There have been examples of success by accident, but these are rare and often short-lived. Success, in other words, is also something that can be designed.

3. A process to create greater efficiency in an organization. Sometimes making your products or services better is not the issue. The challenge lies in making them with greater profit baked into the process. Designers can look at an organization’s processes and design them to be more efficient, thus reducing overall costs.

4. A method for communicating. Like language, design is a way to communicate. Designers have the ability to streamline communications so that the impact of the messages is clear and concise.

Just before the holiday we received my oldest son’s current school progress report. (Thankfully he is a good student and always does well.) This reminded me of a useful tool I’ve found to help measure websites with regard to best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) and web marketing. The tool is the Website Grader.

This tool essentially scans your site for common HTML related to best SEO practices. It combines that data with other data from around the web, such as the web ranking in Google, the number of inbound links on your site, and where your site stands in relation to social media. It then generates an overall grade and a summary report.

Using a tool like this can help you gauge your site’s current rank and determine where you can most effectively put additional resources and time to improve the SEO of your site, and also to get more inbound traffic and converted leads.

Here are some screen shots of what you can expect if you use the tool to generate a report.

After entering your URL, you get a summary grade for your site:

The grader tracks on-page SEO:

It also tracks off-page SEO:

It determines whether you have a blog, and if you do, grades it:

It analyzes what’s happening on your site with regard to social media:

It helps you track information about your competitors’ sites:

Finally, the grader looks at the forms on your site that help convert visitors to leads:

I truly love this time of year. Getting together with family and friends. Sharing a fantastic meal (my wife is a wiz in the kitchen). Even the hustle and bustle of shopping doesn’t get me down. I don’t think we have Thanksgiving often enough. We should have it every few months so that we realize there is so much to be thankful for—even with the economy, and the wars still going on. Our lives in general are easy. We grumble if our lattés are too cold and lament the typical workday. Our ancestors would laugh at how easy our lives are. In honor of this holiday, the folks here at Loewy wanted to send out a “Happy Thanksgiving” to all of you, our clients, friends, and colleagues. You are all very special to us. You’re why we come to work every day—why we’ve been successful—and you’re the inspiration for all the great work we’ve been able to accomplish.

Here are some of the things we’re personally thankful for:

“I give thanks to Thanksgiving, because it brings us back to what really matters in life. This year has been filled with challenges most of us have never experienced before. It’s forced us to be stronger, smarter, more efficient, and more competitive. For this I’m thankful. I’m always thankful for healthy family and friends. Finally, another big thanks goes out to the social web, which allows us to globally exchange ideas, passions, and ‘thanks.’”  -David

“I’m thankful for the clients who understand the value of good design. They let us serve them by leading them down the right paths and they have confidence in our ability to embrace their goals, make them our own, and produce results that are effective and pleasing to look at.”  -Donald

“I’m thankful for the connections I’ve made with co-workers and clients whom I can also call friends. They are understanding, they’re there for me in a pinch, and there is no monetary value that can be placed on them. They are truly recession proof!”  -Selina

“I’m thankful for the continued lowering of the barriers to entry for self-publishing across all media. All forms of expression, from writing to music to video, are getting easier and easier for people to get started with, which lets them contribute to the collective exchange of ideas. I’m even more thankful for the advanced rating, moderation, and filtering systems that make it easy to find the cream of the digital crop.”  -Marc

“I’m thankful to have the ability to be creative every day, and to have that creativity help others.”  -Jenna

“I’m thankful for my parents, who have shown me support above and beyond that shown by any other parents I’ve seen. They are the model of good parenting.”  -Matt

Please comment and tell us what you’re thankful for.

In a previous post, I talked about trimming the fat from content. But let’s face it: trimming the fat assumes you had good meat to start with. In a world where people have precious little time, if you’re thinking site redesign, content strategy has to be a main priority.

I’ve been working with a client recently on a large site redesign. Like many of my other site-redesign projects, this one was long overdue. Much of the content was outdated. It had been managed by a host of individuals, all from different countries, who each had their own way of doing things. The jargon was so product- and business-specific (filled with acronyms and marketing brand names) that it was hard for anyone outside the company to understand. Images (yes, images are content too) were old and poorly optimized, and they incorporated a myriad of photo styles, none of which went together. The client was going to implement a new content management system, which is very robust but needs a lot of management on the development side to institute roles and define content types. What was needed was a true content strategist.

A content strategist works with a client to understand what content will end up on a site, how that content will be organized, what processes will be in place to manage content of different types, and how various types of content relate to one another. Content strategists are part information architects and part copywriters, with a dash of user advocate thrown in. They create rules-based approaches for refining existing content, enhance search optimization of content through metatags and keywords, and develop new content.

While working with an information architect (IA) is necessary in nearly all web and application design projects, for large brochure and information-rich sites a content strategist on the team is also invaluable.

The benefits of working with a content strategist:

• Content strategists are more focused on the specific content of the site and not just the organization of that content as it relates to the overall architecture, as an IA would be.
• A content strategist can develop a matrix that defines content types and sets up relevance relationships to shape how content is linked throughout the site.
• Content strategists can set up keyword, data tag, and metatag information for content elements and pages.
• Content strategists can set up rules for content, such as whether a page title also becomes the menu title to navigate to that page, or whether images should have captions. These details are often too granular for an IA to be involved with.
• A content strategist can define data elements for individual page templates and help the IA structure the priority for those elements. This can be a way to organize existing content, or to help understand what important content elements might be missing.
• Content strategists can help define roles for those who edit content. In complex companies, multiple levels of access and workflow processes might be needed. This “behind the scenes” look into content creation is something information architects don’t often perform.

The history of branding goes back nearly 4,000 years; it was originally conceived to promote ownership. Branding today represents something far more complicated and even elusive for many companies. Today the concept of branding has much more to do with engagement than with ownership. And the act of branding has less to do with a product or service and more to do with the way a company engages an audience with that product or service.

Take a positive experience you’ve had with a brand. What about the experience made it enjoyable? Everything about that experience was an example of branding, from purchasing it to opening up the package (assuming it was a product) to using it for the first time and every time since. If you love that product then the company is doing a good job of branding.

Now think about how this translates online. Take, for example, large media sites like Google or Yahoo. For many people these destination sites have become their default homepage. It is because they are engaging with their users over and over again. In some cases a site you like may have only been a temporary stop for you, or as in the case of Google one you return to often. The point is that if you remember them and go back they are also doing a good job of branding.

If you’re looking for ways your company can do a better job of branding online, here are some suggestions:

1. Interact with your own site often.
It doesn’t matter if you have a social media, product brochure, news, or any other kind of site. You should know it backwards and forwards and should be able to tell what’s good about it and what’s not. You should consider this from both your and the typical user’s perspective. Think about where your site is presenting compelling information, where it’s asking users if they want to connect, and how those connections are nurtured and maintained. Make a list of things you’re doing well. Note where things can improve and what should get tossed altogether.

2. Make sure that the design and usability of your site match the intended position you want your brand to have.
Do you have a fashion product, a toy, a set of corporate services you’re selling? How is the design of your site reflecting that? Who are the audiences that come to your site? Are they the audiences you are trying to cultivate? Are you engaging with them in ways that are most comfortable for them? A brand audit can help you identify how users are connecting with your brand, and what their perceptions are.

3. Offer ways for your users to connect with you.
These can be in the form of a user’s forum, or a Twitter or Facebook page. The point of these is to be engaged. Talk to your customers and allow them to talk to each other. For many businesses this sounds like a dangerous proposition but more often than not, repeat business and referrals are the best ways to build brand loyalty. What’s also good about this is you can help frame the conversation and if something negative does come out of this interaction you can react to it before it snowballs out of control.

4. Talk to a professional.
Branding is complicated. In many cases it requires nuances that only a professional who’s been doing it for a while can provide. Understanding where your brand is today, how it got there, and where it’s headed is often very difficult for someone on the inside and too close to that brand. It often takes an outside perspective to get a full understanding and a new brand strategy.

Everyone knows the economy is bad. I was talking to a friend in the home construction business the other day. His business has dropped nearly 60 percent, and he’s doing better than most in his field. He thinks that a tide of rising inflation over the next six to twelve months will make the economic situation even worse. We’ve all been told that we have to weather the storm. I see it a little differently. I’m a surfer. When a storm comes, I don’t just weather it, I relish it.

This past weekend we saw one of the biggest swells to hit the Northeast in at least half a decade. Hurricane Bill produced waves that averaged 15 feet or more. Everyone was told to stay away from the beaches. But the surfers, those who were brave enough, flocked to them. They saw opportunity and challenge when others saw only adversity. I see the economic storm in the same way. These challenging times require that we work harder, not hide under cover and wait for the storm to pass.

This is exactly the time to be thinking about your online strategy. Connecting with your customers online allows you to be more targeted and ROI-centric, and to do more with less. Email campaigns, building networks though social media, and targeted online ad campaigns are all relatively inexpensive ways to stay connected to your customers. What’s especially good about these media is that they can readily be altered to adjust to changing times. Print campaigns can’t do that, and they’re not as targeted.

And the only thing worse than losing customers when times get tough is losing them for good because someone else took advantage of an opportunity while you sat on your bum.

Okay, imagine you’re on a trip and every sign you come across, instead of indicating “Turn Here,” has a two-paragraph explanation of exactly what to do. It describes the radius of the turn, the precise speed at which the turn should be approached, and so forth.

Now imagine your website as a road. What directions are you giving your visitors? Are you getting them from point A to point B quickly and effectively? Too often, websites are filled with verbose copy that will never be read. So in an effort to get our websites in shape we need to trim the fat.

Don’t write too much. People won’t read it.
A study by Jakob Nielsen found that people read only 20 to 28 percent of the content on a webpage. And they read only 50 percent of the words on a webpage that has 111 words or fewer. If you write tons of text, don’t expect anyone ever to read it. Since people don’t read in depth on the web, we need to use techniques that promote easy scanning of pages so users can find what they are looking for.

Use subheads and bold text. They are scanned more easily.
You just did it. You scanned this blog quickly and are now reading this text. If you weren’t interested in having people scan pages, you could easily have skipped this section. Research shows that people scan pages for topics that interest them. Subheads and bold text help break copy up and highlight content so it’s easier to scan.

Start with the ending. Put your most important points at the top.
Since most visitors won’t get down to the end of that paragraph you’ve written, why put your most important ideas at the bottom? Start your paragraph with your conclusion and then provide the details to support it.

Use labels.
Don’t focus only on the written words. Focus on how the design helps the visitor scan the page more easily. Use labels at the tops of blocks of copy to highlight what each block of copy represents. Is it a case study? Is it a set of instructions? Do you want your users to complete a task? Let them know with small labels or directions.

Does your website look bloated, out of shape, older than it really is, full of a lot of non-nutritious garbage thrown in by the marketing and technology directors who came before you? If your website were a person, would it feel good about itself? Like it or not, your website does have a personality. And if you’re reading this, it probably has one that you want to change. Your website wants to be healthy, look young, and run faster, and you can make that happen. In this series of blogs that will come out over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to talk about putting your website on a diet, trimming unnecessary content, giving it a more youthful glow, and optimizing it to run faster and rank higher in search engines.

Your website should not be a banquet table

How well do you know your website visitors? When thinking about marketing your products and services, do you really think those visitors will want to read everything you have to say—or even half of it? The answer is probably no. So my next question is, why put it all on your site? Many marketing directors think of their websites as a banquet table. They are not sure what their guests will want, so they supply everything: a little helping of this, a small sampling of that. In most cases this just demonstrates to your users that you really don’t know what they want.

The key to a leaner, meaner, and more ROI-centric website is to start with your users. Know who’s visiting your site, what they are looking for and why they are leaving. If you’re not using website tracking metrics—such as Webtrends or Google Analytics—you should, because you don’t know the least bit about your web audience. These are good starting points, but not the only things you can do.

If you are thinking about a redesign or added functionality, you can create a poll on your site to find out how meaningful the idea is. You should be engaging with your users through blogs that can be commented on, Twitter feeds, and other social media outlets such as Facebook pages. You can have a competent team help with research, do surveys, or conduct user interviews. The more you can find out, the better. For most web projects, this will be the first stage in a redesign. Understanding your users will be key to knowing who they are; what they want to accomplish while visiting your site; what content or tools they need to meet those goals; and how to set up the architecture of the site so users can get to that information quickly.