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 recently gave a lecture to the advanced web design class at Farmingdale College. When I met up with professor Jack Harris, he informed me that the kids, mostly juniors and seniors,  saw Loewy Design’s page in the Flash/Dreamweaver Genius Guide, and they were looking forward to meeting with me. A bit embarrassed and very flattered, I asked Jack what book was he talking about and where could I get one.

I later found out that the book is published by Imagine Publishing and promises to be the essential guide to dynamic design and development. We were recognized for our website’s approach to animation and design using purely CSS and Javascript, a technological accomplishment but not exactly what I wanted to talk about in my little seminar. My talk was about the real world lessons that you can’t get from a textbook. I wanted to focus on the process of solving business and branding problems with the online medium.

I tried to push their tech questions aside but they kept coming. I eventually got my point across that the technology we’re using today will be completely different when the students immerse themselves in the job market. They’ll need to educate themselves on the latest versions of Flash and Dreamweaver and keep up with always evolving programming languages throughout their careers.

The most valuable information I could share with them was to describe our thought processes, not only about making a website look great but about creating one that will actually help your clients solve their business challenges. I gave them our secret sauce on how we deliver positive results to our clients and improve their bottom lines.  As a take-away, I provided them, and now you, with a list of reference tools organized by each phase of our process.

By no means is this the complete list, since it too is always evolving, but it could serve as a nice resource and good starting point for students, clients and peers.

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.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Worth recently redesigned their website. Back in my magazine publishing days, I was a big fan of Worth from a design and editorial point of view. They consistently produced provocative covers and nicely designed features, and used innovative illustration. The new online version is a bit of a disappointment, especially in the innovation department.

I would give the new site a passing grade for design and branding, but an Incomplete for its business model and user experience. Some minor issues, starting from the top: the global navigation labels are a bit cryptic. When it comes to global navigation, say it like it is. Section titles that have double meanings, like “Live” (“Live long and prosper” or “Live, it’s Saturday Night”) and “Make” (I won’t get into the ambiguous meanings of that one) are too conceptual and not descriptive enough. Your audience wants to navigate quickly, so don’t make your road signs confusing.

Another mystery is why designate so much prime real estate to a stock market ticker in the top right corner? This affluent community is checking their live market reports through other sources, so I would use this space more wisely.

My biggest question relates to the sustainability of this model in today’s online marketplace. If you are going through a redesign, you need to think far beyond advertising as your only revenue stream. Worth has a nice advisor section which could require paid listings but where’s the community aspect to this site? Worth needs to make users their partners in their online operations.

For example, there’s no way a user can comment on a story, contribute to a blog, subscribe to an RSS feed or even an email newsletter.  Are they not building a database?  Where are the plans for bringing this audience of high-worth individuals together with forums, groups and mobile? Once you’ve got them together you can start monetizing and building different revenue streams.  Perhaps charging for listings in a vendor marketplace; posting jobs; offering premium research (leads) or tools; charging for whitepapers and reports; building affiliate programs…the list goes on. There are many different revenue opportunities for a site like this that should be tested.  Without the community tools and infrastructure in place, there’s nowhere to start.

The community aspect might be in future plans and can always be integrated later — but at this point in time, I don’t think this redesign was really Worth it.

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.

Welcome to our venue for getting personal.  This is where we’ll share our know-how and stay in touch with our professional community. It’s also a platform for others to speak out on trends, best practices and their own insights. It’s a space to open up about our experience and our experiences, and process our processes…and I’ll start off with our thinking about this very blog.

So how do we –or you– know if it’s right to launch a blog? Or the right time? When it seems like everyone’s already blogging, why should anyone start something new?

In our case, we’ve been recommending blogs and social media for clients for sometime now, as part of a robust integrated marketing strategy including other initiatives like email campaigns, search marketing, PR, speaking at conferences, etc. We set our own marketing priorities just as we would advise our clients. First we redesigned our website so that it effectively presents our experience, services and brand personality, and rigged it so it brings in leads and subscribers to our newsletter. Second, we swore to doing our monthly newsletter, Loewy’s Latest, with no excuses, once a month. Now is the blog, and next up is our Facebook Page, Twitter…all the social media we provide the strategy, design and technology for to our clients.

Basically, before starting to roll out social media for our own company, we spent time generating a sort of critical mass through other outlets: optimizing our website to build more traffic, creating a larger pool of contacts through our email newsletter. Now that we’ve achieved that critical mass, it’s time for us to take it further – expand our network and allow the conversations to become less one-way.

A blog is an appropriate choice for us because it’s a good fit with our brand: conversational, friendly, smart, and collaborative.  It’s also a good fit with our goals. We have a lot of experience to communicate but we’re also are always looking for ways to improve and stay on top of emerging trends. Our blog will let us do both.

So how’s your website doing? Does your online identity fit your branding strategy? Does your website’s overall experience match the quality of your products and services?  Are you getting leads, selling products, building awareness or even getting traffic?  If the answer is yes, then maybe you’re ready to do a blog – because you have an audience, a tone of voice and a network. You’re ready to be a thought leader in your industry or at least have an opinion. Of course you can have a blog without a corporate website, and you can even make money at it.   But if you’re like us, and most of our clients and peers, your website is critical for doing business online, disseminating information, and creating the first point of contact for all potential customers.

Let’s say you’ve got it all together and you’re ready get started.  Keep your blog focused, stay in tune with what you know and be relevant to your game.  Yes, there are many blogs in your industry, but any niche or network can use fresh thinking, so don’t be apprehensive. Like any tool, if it is available and right for you, then use it.  Make sure it doesn’t duplicate what your site is already doing for you and your audience – consider it an avenue for a different kind of messaging and communication.

For us, we understand that our audience is an intimate group of professionals looking to share best practices for doing business online. In upcoming posts we’ll be engaging our network and sharing our points of view on what we do best: providing the strategy, design and technology to companies that value the power of the internet. We’re kicking off the dialogue with several topics each month, coming from senior Loewy staffers with different areas of expertise.

Here’s to getting social. We’ve opened the floor, now we invite you to join the conversation…and if commenting is not your thing, just stop by and say Helloewy.