 for a headline and a link, right? There's more contrast, so this first option, no contrast, no visual interest, little more contrast, little more visual interest, more contrast, more visual interest, we get a better. And I also wanna talk about some design principles, right? So we're looking at those sliders. I feel like they would be remiss if I didn't say this. I'm like, do I really need to say this? But yes, yes, yes, I do. Sliders happen when no one can make a decision. Sliders are the results of meetings gone, fairy, fairy girl. Sliders are the results of design. I give up. I give up. You can't make a decision for your business. You can't make a decision on what you're gonna focus on, what's most important to you to communicate. Or it's decision by committee. And their committee can't make a decision or agree on anything. So a slider is the result of, we'll make everybody happy, we'll just stick it in a slider. Sucks, but there's nothing that I can do at this point. So sliders are the worst case scenario in most cases. And here's why. Most people never advance the slide, right? You either set it to auto-advance and then it's moving and people are like, crap, I didn't see what that said. How did I go back? Oh shoot. Oh wait. Daniel. How long did these take? That went so fast. These ones are taking forever. It's back. Wait, shoot. I started from the beginning again. Dang it. Oh wait. And they're like screw it. I give up. Or you don't auto-advance it. And then people realize they don't realize they have to advance it themselves and they never see anything past the first slide. So if you use a slider you have to assume no one will see anything other than the first slide. So anything other than the first one will never be seen. No one will ever click anything. So if you have a slider right now, whatever's on the first slide is what people are seeing. So if you have one, that's okay. Don't be dismayed. But evaluate the content that's on those slides. And if it's built into your theme and it's not an easy thing to change, that's okay too. Make sure the most important thing, if people are only gonna see one slide, make it your first one. And then anything you cover on the slides is after slide one, make sure you also cover it down further on the page, somewhere else on the page. So that people can still engage and get that same content or that same call to action, but somewhere else on the page. Don't simply rely on it being in a slider. Also, do the expected. Don't try to get all fancy. Don't stick the logo on the right. The logo goes on the left. Maybe sometimes in the middle. But people expect it to be on the left. When someone comes to the site, they expect it to be in a certain place. They expect the logo on the left, the navigation on the right, the header at the, you know, the menu at the top. They don't expect the, like, for a while you start seeing all these themes that are like, look, I'm all creative. I put my menu into the bottom of the browser. And then people are like, where? I can't find how to get to the next page. Oh, after like five minutes, I figured out how to get out of the bottom scrolling. Like it's crazy dance. Put things where it's expected, right? So don't try to get all crazy. And when it comes to the important things, you're called to action. Everybody used to like say, put it above the fold. Guess what? There's no fold. Because there's responsive design. There's kind of the idea of a fake fold, right? There's a hard bottom on the bottom of your screen. You want to keep the most important things visible on the screen. But people are used to scrolling. Scrolling is a part of everyday life. People scroll all freaking day long on everything, right? So it's okay. Not everything has to be above the fold or at the top. But the most important thing has to be at the top. Your search should be at the top. Your social icons, not at the top, right? Everybody's like, put my social icons way, way at the top. Now people are like, oh my God, I don't even know if I want to be on Facebook. I don't even know. I don't even know. But I want to say rethink that, right? Rethink where your social icons go. People expect them to be in the putter, especially for brands. We're going to talk about this a little bit more in a minute, but also on a hierarchy, right? Things that are the most important are usually at the top of the page. They're usually the biggest. They're in a video or they're in an image. There's a lot of contrast, right? We look at, there's a lot of white space, right? Low, the low hierarchy, if it's not very important, it's usually stuck at the bottom of the page. It's in the putter. It's surrounded by a bunch of other things. It's going to be a text link instead of a button, right? So the difference between low and high visibility, you'll honor that hierarchy, right? Add in things don't need to go up into your top menu, stick it in a putter menu, right? So we want to look at what is the most important things on the page, right? We tell clients, if somebody only looks at one thing on this entire page, what do you want that one thing to be? If they like it, they're interested and they stay a little longer and they look at a second thing, what's the second thing you want them to see? If they really like you and they stay even longer, what's the third thing? Based on those actions, you know what needs to go to the top, the middle, and the bottom of the page. Also, spacing matters when it comes to design, right? If we look at these are almost exactly the same, but on the left, all the spacing is exactly the same. And on the right, we have a bigger gap in the middle. Spacing matters because things that are close together subconsciously say these things belong together. So on this side, even though the text is broken up with a subhead line, it still all runs together. So subconsciously, your brain says this is all one thing. It's just different parts of one thing. We're on the right, subconsciously, your brain says that's two different sections. It's two different things. So spacing, even though it doesn't seem like a big deal, and that's really only the difference of like 10 pixels. That little difference of 10 pixels subconsciously makes a really big difference. But close to the end, I've got a couple of difficult reminders before we'll have some Q&A. Clear is better than clever. When it comes to design, it is always better to be clear. Simple, easy to understand. Don't get all fancy with your navigation things. Call them all weird things. You may think you know what they mean, but nobody else knows what they mean, right? If it's a services page, call it a services page. Try not to get all clever. The idea here is people are bombarded constantly with marketing messages and calls to actions and all kinds of other things, and everything is hard. And there's ads everywhere, and it's an awful experience. When they come to your site, do what's expected. Make it really clear, make it really easy. Make one primary call to action per page, right? Don't make your calls to action. Fight against each other. It's like having a car, doing it with yourself. One primary call to action, one thing that has a button. That's the easiest way to say it. One thing that has a button. On a blog post, one thing that has a button that's your opt-in. You can have other calls to action in your content. Those are text links. One thing with a button, anything else is a text link, right, but one primary call to action. And then reduce your distractions. If you do have a sidebar, never make your sidebar longer than your content. Find the page on your website with the tiniest bit of content there is and make your sidebar shorter than that content. Otherwise, you end up with a long sidebar and a little bit of content, a funky giant white gap of nothingness that makes it look like you messed up. So always make your sidebar short and then rethink those social links again, right? Rethink whether they should be in the header or in the top of your sidebar or wherever they are. Social sharing links, stick them at the bottom of your post because one, most people don't use them. And two, if they've reached the bottom, they're more likely to share. Links to your profiles, not the social sharing of your blog posts, but links to your profiles, stick them on your footer because I'll leave you with this thing to think about. Every time that you link to a social media account, every icon that you stick on your website is an opportunity for somebody to leave, find their friends, dog pictures, cat pictures, boo, whatever it is, get distracted and forget the paper on your site in the first place. Every single social icon you add, you're giving people more opportunities to leave your site and to not engage with your content. So do me a favor as you work on your sites. Practice good web design, not web decoration. Everything needs to have a purpose for being there. And with that said, I'm Jennifer Moore and thanks for having me. I'm Jennifer Moore. But no, if a client's not gonna listen and they demand, you know, they want a slider, they want whatever, your due diligence as a designer then is to say, well that's great, we go with that and have that movement but we need to look at all the content that's gonna go in that slider. It also needs to go somewhere else on the page below that in case people don't advance that slider. That way, we're here covered no matter what. Well then there's really no queue. And if you can do your best to advise them, but ultimately, can't wait to take your advice. So I was gonna say, we were talking about some of the sliders in a tower full of sliders. Oh. You think sliders are good in the travel thing? A gallery would be better than a slider in the travel post of images. If you wanna display a lot of images, a gallery is better than a slider. Like a slider still, people aren't gonna advance all those things. The only time I think sliders work really, really well is in like portfolios or different things like that where you're specifically looking at things like that. So in most cases, I'll pick a gallery over a slider. I use a slider, we use a slider in our portfolio. And that I think is a good use case, but in content-wise, I usually, I will always pick gallery over a slider. Are you gonna make a slide available somewhere? They're on SlideShare. You go to slideshare.net and look at Jennifer Bourne. You'll find my slides right there. Yep. If you want to. No shaking hands. You please start shaking hand pictures. Yes, I have used one shaking hand picture, but it has to be, I think, in a context, depending. Yeah, I don't, yes, I'm shaking hands. On the subject of images and yesterday, and I used a combat, you know, you get a satellite with your customers and they want to put full-width pictures of their things, you know, any old pictures of them, all right, and like that, and it's big. Do you have any sort of approach to making it automatically cut the size of the image down? Oh, to cropping the image for them? Just, yeah, sort of say the image will get short down to 600 feet in size, and compressions. Featured image-wise or things like that, the image will be cropped or they'll be brought in. We'll use that for the specific size. Bryant, we use E-W-W.io or image-to-compressor, like you can have a client that uploads like 6,000 pixel-wide images, and they'll upload like 10 of them to a blog post. We've been telling them for four years, like once a month. They don't, we're like, no. So image compression for that one, and we're like, put that on high. Like we've got to knock that down for them. So that, you know, you can do it in a couple different ways, but to be honest, like if you're not taking for support, I launched your site and you don't want anything that you think we have your sites done, you're like, no, I'm doing everything myself. I don't care what you do. No, no, no. Hey, me anymore. You chose to not take us up for on-doing support. You chose to not have us work with you to work on your site or to manage your blog or do whatever, then it's up to you. Like I did my best. I turned it over and it was awesome if you make bad choices. I'm sorry. Right, so you might just tell them that you use the size. Yeah, we'll go through. I mean, when we turn the site over, we do training and like we use advanced custom deals and one of the things that you can do in image uploaders or things like in the back of the site, it says upload this image at 1500 by 500 pixels wide like for a hero image. It'll say the size and then when they go to upload it, everything in the media library that's not 1500 by 500 is not enabled. Like they can't pick anything but one that size. So we'll do that sometimes to kind of force it. So yeah, anybody else? Yeah. Well, if you talk fast, I could probably do too. Navigation, maybe you said great on the desktop or a laptop, you talk top menus, then you have a mouse. But I have to say the icons really seem very clumsy to me on the phone. Do you have any advice to sharpen up navigation? I think that the hamburger menu is the industry standard. It's only becoming more and more and more and more common. It's everywhere. Everybody uses it becoming the expected. But I think if your audience isn't one that's super tech savvy, they're not online all the time. If your audience is a casual user, then you need to add the best thing to do is to use the word menu or add the word menu next to that hamburger icon. But again, it goes into clear is better than clever. So if your audience isn't one that spends a lot of time online and the hamburger menu might not be familiar with them, then go with the use the word menu. We have a subscription to Shutterstock. And I think that they're actually getting crappier. But I think that they're just allowing a lot of crack images in. But we need a subscription from there. But it just kind of depends on the budget and what you're looking for if you want to come out. But OK, I think we'll do one more and then we're done. Yes. OK, so subscription forms, you were saying that the most important thing to talk about? Yes. And that's why you're crazy about the rest of the talk, because you're actually trying to find anything to talk to the site. What are the subscription forms that scroll? Well, I don't know. It depends on the page, right? So her question was subscription forms. I say put the most important things at the top. If your opt-in's the most important thing, should it go at the top? And is that the right place? If they haven't even continued your content yet? And my answer is it depends on the page. It's not the same for every page on your website. So on a blog post, I would never put an opt-in at the top of the page, because the best place on a blog post is at the bottom of the blog post when they're done. Or for clients who use a sidebar, we put it not at the top of the sidebar. We put it at the bottom of the sidebar and make it sticky so that when they scroll up, it sticks to the top. And no matter how long they scroll, the opt-in is always there and it never goes away. So it depends on the page. For certain pages, it's going to be at the top. Like it may have a video and a call to action, like a video and a little bit of content, and an opt-in next to it, and it's at the top. A short squeeze page, opt-in, whatever. Blog posts, you're going to put them in different places. So if the position of your call to action will change based on the page, the whole content that you have. Or it's 11.52, lunch is on the tables outside.